by Richard Subber | Jan 19, 2021 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
a first-class bad guy…
Movie review:
The Wind and the Lion (1975)
Candice Bergen as Mrs. Eden Pedecaris.
Sean Connery as Mulay Achmed Mohammed el-Raisuli, Lord of the Rif and Sultan to the Berbers.
In real life he was Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni (Raisuli) (1871-1925), a Sherif and Lord of the Rif in Morocco, a tribal leader and brigand, “the last of the Barbary pirates.”
The Wind and the Lion is a dramatic interpretation of a real incident in Morocco in 1904. The real Raisuli kidnapped an American, Ion “Jon” Hanford Perdicaris (1840-1925) and his stepson, and held the two for ransom. President Teddy Roosevelt sent U. S. marines to rescue the men. Ultimately, the government of Morocco paid the ransom and the men were released.
The movie is wonderfully dashing, and the brutal details are romantically minimized. The captive American, Candice Bergen, doesn’t quite fall in love with Sean Connery, but it seems to be a close call.
Connery, with all of his moustaches and flowing robes, is a first class bad-guy hero, and he has a good heart. He’s happy to get his money, but he’s sorry to say goodbye to Mrs. Pedecaris.
In the final scene, the Raisuli and his lieutenant, the Sherif of Wazan, are silhouetted on a high beach against the setting sun, and the Sherif plaintively declares “Great Raisuli, we have lost everything. All is drifting on the wind as you said. We have lost everything.”
Raisuli revives the heart throbs: “Sherif, is there not one thing in your life that is worth losing everything for?”
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Proud Tower
…a lot more than a history book…
by Barbara Tuchman
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jan 4, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
…a little more time in childhood…
Book review:
Girl With A Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier
New York: PLUME, The Penguin Group, 1999
Girl with a Pearl Earring is a slim offering of compelling historical fiction about Johannes Vermeer’s enigmatic portrait of an unknown young girl, circa 1665.
It’s a breathtaking, tantalizing love story…tantalizing because Vermeer and the maid, Griet, almost embrace their passion, each stepping over the line without transgression, but not without hurt.
Vermeer, the worldly one, the master in a house filled with the baleful women of his family, tempted to the edge of the precipice…
Griet, the child innocent, heedless of her woman’s heat, trespassing unaware and ever nearer to the mystery that she barely understands in the beginning…
She becomes the girl with a pearl earring. She feels the lush weight of the earring, his fingertip sears her skin, she inclines toward his touch, trembles with a disembodied, virginal start of pain…
She sits for him.
He trembles—a long moment—with the rush of desire, masters it, and steps back to his easel, granting her a little more time in the childhood she is leaving behind, giving her a peace that will become a bereavement, a keening memory…
They look at each other, mute, apart, yet bound, in flagrante delicto, withering, without joy…
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(Freebie: the 2003 film, Girl with a Pearl Earring, is a slam dunk clone of Tracy Chevalier’s book. Colin Firth (Vermeer) and Scarlett Johansson (Griet) stepped off the pages of the book, onto the movie set. They make you wish the ending could be different.)
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bridges of Madison County
If you’re looking for
highly stoked eroticism
and high-rolling lives
that throw off sparks when they touch,
look elsewhere.
by Robert Waller
click here
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 29, 2020 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
the “milliohnim” and “the promised land”
Book review:
Thieves in the Night:
Chronicle of an Experiment
by Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1946
357 pages
Koestler, a Hungarian-British writer and journalist, more famously wrote Darkness at Noon, a critique of Communism and totalitarianism.
Thieves in the Night, written later, is a gently powerful story. Koestler recounts the travails and limited joys of only a few of the “milliohnim” who sought a promised land. His characters are Jews, creating new settlements on purchased Arab land in the Holy Land, prior to World War II.
Men and women who create settlements live a tough life. A reader like me learns almost too much about the vagaries and drudgery of deliberately, fully conscious communal life on Ezra’s Tower, an isolated hilltop in Galilee. First, establish the security perimeter, then erect the watchtower, build the children’s dorm, construct the cowshed, set up the showers…in that order. The dining hall, the sleeping huts for the men and women, and the lavatories are to be built later.
The Mukhtar and his clan in the nearby Arab village do not welcome the Hebrew newcomers. Soon, the leader of the village delegation gives morbid advice to the settlers: “You young fools and children of death, you don’t know what may happen to you.” Bauman responds curtly: “We are prepared.” The Jewish settlement at Ezra’s Tower is not a resort.
The story of the settlers’ life at Ezra’s Tower is mostly drab. Koestler’s exploration of their mindset, their politics, their philosophy, and their religion all swirled together is stunning. Their aspirations and their misgivings, and their palpable legacy of homelessness and their transforming experiences, are irresistible.
Thieves in the Night is an adventure for the open and inquiring mind. Occasional sympathetic despair is a perfectly understandable reaction.
After you read this novel, look around you and ask yourself if you see things a bit differently. Ask yourself if you like your new conception of “a thief in the night.”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
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Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells much truth about old age…
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 22, 2020 | Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews, Tidbits
Guess who wasn’t coming to dinner at your house in 1967…
Well, if you grew up in a white family, it’s a pretty good bet that a handsome black guy—a doctor!—wasn’t planning on sitting down to dinner and telling you he planned to marry your daughter.
That’s the reality that was.
So, about 50 years ago, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton and Beah Richards and Roy Glenn got crazy in Hollywood and filmed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It was a blockbuster. Houghton (daughter) and Poitier (doctor) played lovely young people who were in love, and everybody got with the program by the end of the movie, and they lived happily ever after. (There were Oscars, click here).
It’s a poignant and dramatically dynamic movie. Every character throws firecrackers at least a couple times, and everybody catches the firecrackers with high art and deftly normalized social criticism and passionate declarations about the right thing.
I’ve watched it several times. For me, it doesn’t get old. I like to live in the world with people who say “If you love somebody, you gotta love somebody, so go ahead and do it.”
The movie turned a lot of heads, but I’m guessing it didn’t change a whole lot of minds.
….and don’t forget that the last recorded lynching of a black man (Michael Donald) in America was near Mobile, Alabama, in 1981.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not his best…
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Nov 4, 2020 | Democracy, Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry, Politics, Power and inequality
Too many gulfs…
Hand me that hammer
This lightening sky pulls my eye
upward from newly darkening earth.
Our troubled plain
has no points of light just now.
We face fears, terrors, hates, imprecations,
repudiations, exclusions…
Too many gulfs appearing,
too few bridges imagined
in the grim thoughts of too many.
I will build one bridge today,
I welcome this lightening sky
to ease my work.
November 9, 2016
I work on building a bridge every day. I try to do a good thing every day. That’s good for me and for America. It helps to keep me sane.
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
They didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
