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Finding You (movie review)

Jan25

I just watched the movie that’s based on this Christian romance novel by Jenny Jones. And I can say that my book review goes double for the movie. If it hadn’t been for the setting, Ireland, I don’t think I would have made it through the entire movie. It’s sort of a Hallmark movie with cute actors and very poor plotting and dialog. So many unbelievable and disconnected twists and turns, and yet at the same time so predictable. Of course the two sisters who are the enactors of a lifelong feud, manage to reconcile just before one of the sisters dies. Of course, boy manages to end up with girls despite the many obstacles along the way. However, the course of true does NOT run smooth. Oh, and there’s a town drunk who magically becomes both wise and sober whenever

Watch it via Amazon when you’re in the mood for something mindless and sort of Irish. Well, at least the scenery is Irish.The accents are sometimes Irish. The story is, well, not to be blamed on the Irish. (Oh, the movie leaves out any God-talk, except for a brief shot of a Bible verse on a tombstone.)

Documentaries: Take 2

Oct25

A member of a Facebook group that I’m in asked people to comment about their favorite documentary films. From all the comments that were posted, I made a list of documentaries that I would like to watch. And I’ve been watching some of them this past weeks. So far, I have watched eight films, and I have definitely thought that all eight were worth the time and worth recommending. Here’s where I wrote about the first four films in my documentary watching project. If you have any such films to recommend, please comment and let me know about your favorite documentaries.

The Mystical World of George MacDonald. (2009, watched on youtube)
If you are a MacDonald fan, either via C.S. Lewis’s recommendation or directly through such stories as The Princess and Curdie or At the Back of the North Wind, this film is for you. It’s a lovely overview of MacDonald’s life and work, with emphasis on the adult fantasies Phantastes and Lilith, and also with some meanders and tangential material that seems to fit the subject. I would have liked more about MacDOnald’s family and friends and family life, but you can’t have everything. Not mind-blowing, but serviceable.

The Thin Blue Line. (2008, rented from Amazon)
This movie is the film that helped release a wrongfully convicted man from prison. Dallas policeman Robert Wood was shot during a routine traffic stop in 1976, aged 27. Randall Dale Adams was accused convicted for the crime. The only witness, initially, was 16year old David Harris, a car thief and a braggart who told friends in Vidor that he killed the cop in Dallas. But when he was arrested David Harris told another story, a story that implicated Randall Adams and made him responsible for the shooting. The Dallas police, the Dallas district attorney, and later a jury decided that David Harris was telling the truth. This film examines the evidence and the witnesses and leads to a different conclusion. Randall Dale Adams died in 2010, aged 61; David Ray Harris died in 2004 aged 43.

Searching for Sugar Man. (2012, watched on Netflix)
The person who recommended this documentary about the life story of a 60’s musician named Jesus Rodriguez said to just watch it, not to read about it beforehand. And that’s what I did and what I recommend to you. Surprisingly thoughtful and touching, this movie brought up interesting questions about success and art that I am still pondering days after watching it.

Many Beautiful Things. (2016, rented from Amazon)
“Many Beautiful Things is the untold story of one of the world’s greatest women artists and why her name was nearly lost to history. Plunge into the complex age of Victorian England to meet Lilias Trotter, a daring young woman who defied all norms by winning the favor of England’s top art critic, John Ruskin.” An amazing and, yes, beautiful story of the impact of one life spent in service to God and man. I am inspired to remain faithful to the calling that God has placed upon my life, my library and my writing, prayer and study. It’s difficult to persevere when the results are hidden and unrealized, but most, if not all, of us are called to do just that.

These last two documentaries were especially thought-provoking and rich. I would recommend both Searching for Sugar Man and Many Beautiful Things for those artists and ministers and servants who are discouraged in their pursuit of a life that is authentic and fruitful. The truth embodied in both of these stories is that I am called to be faithful, and I may never know what God will do with my life or my art or my work. He is the Gardener, and the Vine; I am simply a small branch.

Documentaries: Take 1

Oct12

A member of a Facebook group that I’m in asked people to comment about their favorite documentary films. From all the comments that were posted, I made a list of documentaries that I would like to watch. And I’ve been watching some of them this week. So far, I have watched four films, and I have definitely thought that all four were worth the time and worth recommending.

Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry. (2017, watched on Netflix)
This film was good, but misnamed, I think. It wasn’t about Wendell Berry, the author, as much as it was about farming and farm policy and the takeover of commercial methods and big business in agriculture, the death of the family farm. As I watched I felt I understood the problem better, but I didn’t see the solutions. Maybe there is no going back to the way agriculture was done in the past on small farms, on a small scale. Even though the film showed some farmers who were trying to scale back and form small local cooperatives, it was obvious that tobacco farming, at least, was never going to be profitable or even doable on a small scale again. And since that’s the kind of farming Wendell Berry is looking back to as his ideal, I’m not sure what to think about the film itself. I also wonder if tobacco farming itself is going to be a thing of the past, since the advent of vaping and e-cigarettes. Unless someone finds other uses for tobacco. Maybe someone needs to do for tobacco what George Washington Carver did for the peanut and for sweet potatoes. Anyway, watch this one to learn more about the farming crisis and to learn a little bit about Wendell Berry. The musical score for the film is fantastic.

13th. (2016, watched on Netflix)
I watched this film about the history of slavery and prisons and mass incarceration with one of my adult daughters, and it was quite provocative and thoughtful. The title is a reference to the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It reminded me of the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, and sure enough, Mr. Stevenson was featured as one of the commentators on the film. Like I Am Not Your Negro, which I watched last year, this documentary helps explain some of the racial unrest in our nation and the Black Lives Matter movement in particular. I’m not at all sure I agree with all of the agenda that the film is trying push, but I do feel more informed and even empathetic. We do have a history of racism in this country, and that history does influence how black people and white people think about current events. It’s very difficult to think past one’s own presuppositions, especially when we don’t even realize that the underlying prejudices and presuppositions are there, in the first place.

Life, Animated. (2016, watched on Amazon Prime)
A 23 year old young man, Owen Suskind, uses his immersion in Disney films to make sense of the world and ameliorate and inform his understanding of himself and his place in the world as he deals with his autism. Of the four documentary films I’ve watched so far, this one was the best and most hopeful. I was delighted by this story of a boy who, at the age of three, suddenly became autistic and lost his ability to speak meaningfully or to communicate with family. Owen’s parents have a huge role in the film and in Owen’s life, but the film is really about Owen growing up and becoming independent as he deals with the knowledge that his parents won’t always be available and can’t live his life for him. It’s also about how the Disney movies helped and continue to help Owen to connect with other people and to understand the world he lives in. Again, I found this film fascinating.

AlphaGo. (2017, watched on Netflix)
The ancient Chinese game of “Go” is for some people, especially in Asia but really around the world, a metaphor for life and the struggle to live creatively and strategically. In this film, AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence neural network, competes against Lee Sedol, a top level world champion at the game of Go. Because, like chess, this game is for many people a life’s work, the competition between man and machine is particularly intense and consequential. Lee Se-dol, is a South Korean professional Go player of 9 dan rank. AlphaGo is a computer program that can adjust and “teach itself” to play Go and to win at Go, a very complicated game. Go is much more complicated than chess, for example. Anyway, the story of how Lee Sedol and AlphaGo played a three games out of five tournament and who won is a nail-biter. I’m not sure I understand all of the implications of this kind of “deep learning” network, but it feels significant and rather amazing.

So, those are the four documentaries I’ve watched so far. I’ll be back with more mini-reviews soon.

By the way, if you have any favorite documentaries to recommend, I’ll add them to my list. What are your favorite nonfiction films and documentaries?

Julius Caesar by John Gunther

Apr10

Since most of what I know about Julius Caesar comes from Shakespeare (and a little GB Shaw, which I assume is mostly fiction), I learned a lot about the life and times of Mr. Caesar from reading this Landmark history book for middle grade children. Yes, his surname really was Caesar; it became a term for a ruler or king after Julius and Augustus made it famous.

Julius Caesar was a successful and intrepid general and an excellent and shrewd politician; that’s how he rose to the place where he was a threat to the Roman republic and ripe for assassination. I didn’t really realize that he won so many important battles or subjugated so much territory. I also didn’t know about, and still don’t understand, the intricate and corrupt state of Roman politics in the time of Julius Caesar. Caesar had to weave his way through some labyrinthine politics that would challenge a modern American political consultant or campaign manager. And I thought our political system was bad. If Washington, D.C. is a swamp, Rome was a swamp in which people actually died over their failure to back the right candidate for tribune or consul. And that’s before Julius Caesar died for being so ambitious. (Apparently, Sulla was a bad dude.)

I learned or had confirmed a few more things about Julius Caesar:

~ He liked the Jews and gave them special privileges to practice their religion in Rome.
~ According to Gunther, it was on Caesar’s watch that the library of Alexandria burned down. (Although Wikipedia says no one knows exactly when it burned and that there may have been several separate fires over the space of hundreds of years.)
~ Caesar did have a fling with Cleopatra, and she did get delivered to his headquarters in a pile of rugs. (GBS was right about that.) Egyptian politics were just as complicated, devious, and deadly as Roman politics.
~ The Rubicon is (was?) a shallow, insignificant river, but crossing the Rubicon, the boundary of his authority to lead an army, was a momentous decision for Caesar, the beginning of the end for Julius Caesar and for the Roman Republic.
~ Julius Caesar used the phrase “Veni, vidi, vici” in a letter to the Roman Senate after he had achieved a quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela.

Gunther leans heavily on Shakespeare in the concluding chapters of the book, but I think both Gunther and Shakepeare were leaning heavily on Plutarch and Suetonius for the facts on Julius Caesar’s life, his death and the aftermath of his assassination. According to Gunther, “Friends, Romans, countrymen” was an actual speech that Mark Antony gave at Caesar’s funeral, and it was indeed a real barnburner. Portia really did commit suicide by swallowing burning coals (ouch!), and Brutus truly was a noble but indecisive character. According to Gunther, everything went pretty much the way Shakepeare wrote it many years later. (Except for Caesar’s ghost, which probably didn’t appear; I’m not much of a believer in ghosts, and Gunther doesn’t mention any spooks.)

This book would be an excellent prequel to watching Shakepeare’s Julius Caesar. The movie version with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony is an excellent film, even if it is in black and white.

To learn more about the Landmark series of biographies and history books for young people, check out this podcast episode, Parts 1 and 2, of Plumfield Moms, What Are Landmark Books? Why Do They Matter?

The World’s Greatest Showman by J. Bryan III

Jan4

The World’s Greatest Showman: The Life of P.T. Barnum by J. Bryan III.

I’m going with some of the urchins to see The Greatest Showman, the new movie musical starring Hugh Jackman as Phineas Taylor Barnum, the great huckster, advertiser, showman, lecturer, and promoter of nineteenth century America. So I had to pull out the Landmark history book about the life and times of Mr. Barnum so that I could check the movie against reality. I’m told that there’s not much reality in the movie.

If so, that’s probably a tribute to the real P.T. Barnum, who included about as much truth and reality in his shows and his advertisements and media campaigns as the average Hollywood movie mogul does in his, not very much. Everything in Barnum’s shows, first his New York museum, and then his circus, was colossal, unique, amazing, stupendous, prodigious, and/or fantastic—because Barnum said so. He was a liar and a humbug (one of his favorite descriptors), but the public knew it and ate it up. He made a fortune first for himself, but also for Charles Stratton, aka General Tom Thumb, for The Swedish Nightingale singer Jenny Lind, and for numerous other performers and partners who worked with and for him.

He also lost more than one personal fortune. Five different fires destroyed his various businesses and homes at different times, and he never did learn to adequately insure his holdings against disaster. Each time, according to the book, he was under-insured and had to start all over again building up his museum or circus or house to come back from the brink.

The World’s Greatest Showman portrays Barnum as a joker and a salesman, certainly not averse to exaggeration or downright lies as long as he could put on a good show and rope in a big audience. His views and actions in regard to racial issues and and slavery and justice were mixed, as befits the time in which he lived (1810-1891). But he was all-in-all a likable character, generous and a sharp businessman at the same time, a teetotaler and a “religious man”, according to Wikipedia, a dedicated member of the Universalist Church.

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I’ve been to see the movie, and it was a great show, but not at all true to the life of P.T. Barnum. The movie took many liberties with the timeline and events of Barnum’s life, but that’s to be expected. Barnum would probably not have minded a bit or a even a lot of “humbug” in the interest of a good show. However, two elements of the movie plot would emphatically not have been to Mr. Barnum’s taste.

As I said, Barnum was quite dedicated to the temperance movement, didn’t drink alcohol at all, and encouraged others to abstain from alcoholic beverages, too. In the movie, he not only drinks, he’s rarely seen without a drink in his hand or sharing champagne or whiskey with friends, associates, and strangers. In fact, in the movie, alcohol almost becomes a symbol of the joie de vivre that Barnum tries to share with everyone he meets.

Also, Jenny Lind was Barnum’s friend and associate, and he did sponsor, finance, and arrange her American tour. But she would never have kissed him or tried to seduce him, on stage or off. Jenny Lind was, indeed, a devout Christian, and she gave most of her money, if not all of it, away to charities and churches. She and Barnum parted amicably before her contract with him had quite expired because she was tired of his commercialism and relentless promotions, even though she wanted to make as money as she could for her charitable endeavors.

Still, I recommend the movie and the Landmark book about his life. Each tells the story of a different man, one factual and the other fictional. I enjoyed both stories, and the music in the movie and Hugh Jackman’s performance as Barnum were worth the ticket price. (The movie reviewer at EW didn’t cut the movie any slack at all, and that wasn’t the only bad review I found in a cursory search. So you may want to ask yourself how much you can abide in the name of humbug from a fictionalized musical bio-pic.)

Quoting P.T. Barnum:

“Men, women, and children who cannot live on gravity alone need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is, in my opinion, in a business established by the Creator of our nature. If he worthily fulfills his mission and amuses without corrupting, he need never feel that he has lived in vain.”

“There’s no such thing as bad publicity. I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”

“Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd.”

“More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much.”

“I am a showman by profession… and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me.”

“The bigger the humbug, the better people will like it.”

To learn more about the Landmark series of biographies and history books for young people, check out this podcast episode, Parts 1 and 2, of Plumfield Moms, What Are Landmark Books? Why Do They Matter?

10 Movies I Want to See in 2018

Dec31

Goodbye, Christopher Robin. (October 13, 2017) “British biographical drama film about the lives of Winnie-the-Pooh creator A. A. Milne and his family, especially his son Christopher Robin.”

Wonder. (November 17, 2017) Based on the book by R.J. Palacio.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi. (December 15, 2017) No, I haven’t seen it yet.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. (December 20, 2017) Based on the picture book by Chris Van Allsburg.

The Greatest Showman. (December 20, 2017) Starring Hugh Jackman as circus showman P.T. Barnum.

Darkest Hour. (December 22, 2017) If it’s about Winston Churchill, I want to see it.

A Wrinkle in Time. (March 9, 2018) Based on the book by Madeleine L’Engle.

Chappaquiddick. (April 6, 2018) (Has this movie already been released?) Anyway, it’s about Ted Kennedy and his infamous drunk driving accident that killed his young companion, Mary Jo Kopechne.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (May 25, 2018) Directed by Ron Howard. “Han Solo and Chewbacca’s adventures before joining the Rebellion, including their early encounters with Lando Calrissian.”

Christopher Robin (August 3, 2018) “An adult Christopher Robin, who is now focused on his new life, work, and family, suddenly meets his old friend Winnie the Pooh, who returns to his unforgotten childhood past to help him return to the Hundred Acre Wood and help find Pooh’s lost friends.”

Mary Poppins Returns (December 25, 2018) “In Depression-era London, a now-grown Jane and Michael Banks, along with Michael’s three children, are visited by the enigmatic Mary Poppins following a personal loss. Through her unique magical skills, and with the aid of her friend Jack, she helps the family rediscover the joy and wonder missing in their lives.” With Lin-Manuel Miranda! And Dick van Dyke!

Obviously, I like Star Wars and movies that are based on children’s books, with a little bit of history and movie bio-pic thrown into the mix.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Apr25

Here are my thoughts from 2014 on the book called The Circle, soon to be released as a motion picture. Perhaps the movie will fill out the characters and retain the thought-provoking ideas.

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Are you afraid of the continued encroachment of Big Government and Big Business and Big Internet on the privacy of individuals? Are you worried about the implications of surveillance drones, cashless business models, data-mining, and internet search engines that seem to be more and more ubiquitous and indispensable to more and more people? Have you opted out of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and all other social media sites because you want to keep your self to yourself?

If you answered yes to all three questions, you don’t need to read The Circle, but you’ll probably want to read it because you’ll find your own opinions about privacy, the internet, and our own Brave New World, validated and extended in this fictional dsytopia where “The Circle” of everyone knowing everything about everyone is almost complete. If Eldest Daughter wanted to win her friends over to her way of thinking about what the internet is doing to humans and to their social abilities and to their privacy rights, she would give a copy of The Circle to each of them with an admonition to read at their own risk.

Scary stuff. It’s somewhat unbelievable that the main character, a young college graduate named Mae, is so gullible as to never really question, even once, the vast internet conspiracy (or benevolent business model) that is called The Circle in this story. In fact, Mae is a frustrating character, so blind to the consequences of her actions and to the implications of a society built on the concept of complete and total transparency, as to be rather mindless. However, this book isn’t about either plot or characters: it’s about propaganda. It’s about what living a virtual life in a virtual world with social media as our most vital connection could do to us. Have we become, or are we in danger of becoming, rather mindless ourselves? Are we willing to give up all of our freedom for the sake of safety and security? Could our private lives and our independent judgment be taken away, or could we be induced to give them away, piece by piece, for a mess of pottage?

SECRETS ARE LIES, SHARING IS CARING, PRIVACY IS THEFT!

If you believe these central organizing “truths” of The Circle, read The Circle and think about the real implications of a world that is totally and mandatorily transparent. If you believe that Google and Facebook and Twitter are the opiates of the masses, and that 1984 is closer than we think, read The Circle and be vindicated. If you’re philosophically opposed to agitprop and think you already know all about the message Mr. Eggers has to preach, skip it.

Bottom line: flat characters, improbable plot and characterizations, thought-provoking message.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman

Mar28

I read The Zookeeper’s Wife back in 2008 and wrote about it on Semicolon. Since the book is set to become a movie at the end of March, here are my thoughts on the book at the time I read it.

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Jan Zabinski was the Polish director of the Warsaw Zoo in 1939 when the Nazis invaded and subjugated Poland. His wife, Antonina, was his helpmate in runing the zoo and the mother of a young son. During the German occupation, she gave birth to a daughter as well.

This nonfiction book tells the story of how Jan and Antonina worked with the Polish Underground to hide Jews, stockpile arms and ammunition, eventually participate in the doomed Uprising of August 1944 when the Russians halted outside Warsaw and allowed the Germans to destroy the Polish Underground that had come out of hiding to support the Allies in re-taking Poland and driving the Nazis out. A lot of the story tells about the animals in the zoo and what happened to them and how Antonina survived pregnancy-related illnesses, inadequate rations, and providing secret hospitality for fifty to seventy people at any given time throughout the course of the war and the German occupation.

Something about the way the story was told made me admire these people, but not like them very much. I’m not sure what I didn’t like, but I felt uncomfortable in their company. Jan seemed very controlling, and Antonina like a wife making excuses for an authoritarian husband. Maybe that’s not the way it was at all since Ms. Ackerman derives her story from written accounts, Antonina’s diary mostly, and from interviews with people who knew the Zabinskis during the war. Both Jan and Antonina Zabinski died before this book was conceived. Their son, Rys, did contribute his memories of a childhood filled with animals and with war.

I don’t know. I’m ambivalent. If you like nonfiction about animals and and about World War II, you should try it out.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Mar2

I read and reviewed this slim novel back in 2012, and since it’s supposed to be coming out as a movie in March, I thought I’d repost, FYI. I’m wondering how well the movie will be able to capture the “unreliable narrator” point of view.

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I do believe SFP at pages turned nailed this one. (You’ll only want to read her thoughts after you’ve read the book.) It’s a short book, a novelette really, but the ending isn’t . . . exactly. Hence the title.

The book is only 176 pages long, but it tells the story of Tony Webster’s life from his perspective, which it turns out is somewhat skewed. Maybe. Tony doesn’t “get it.” The book raises the possibility that we’re all like Tony, that our memories are unreliable and we really don’t understand each other or the events of our lives very well.

The Sense Of An Ending won the 2011 Man Booker prize for literature. I think it well worth the the time invested to read it and think about it.

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.”

“We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient— it’s not useful— to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.”

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.

FNFC: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man

Jan23

This Hitchcock film from 1956 comes with introductory remarks by Hitchcock himself; he tells us that this film is different from his other movies because it is a true story. The false arrest and imprisonment of Mr. Christopher Emmanuel Ballestrero (aka Manny) actually took place in New York City in 1953. He was accused by several eyewitnesses of having committed armed robbery. The police took Mr. Ballestrero into custody on the word of these witnesses and subjected him to a rather primitive and inconclusive form of a police line-up and then charged him with the armed robbery.

In addition to asking why the movie was in black and white instead of color, my daughters were amazed at the lack of due process and proper police procedure that led to the wrongful arrest and indictment of Manny Ballestero. No Miranda warning (Miranda vs. Arizona, 1966), no lawyer provided (Gideon vs. Wainright, 1963), and police questioning and investigation that was unfair and rather perfunctory—it certainly didn’t look anything like a current day police drama or criminal investigation. We don’t realize what protections we have now that weren’t there a little over fifty years ago. Perhaps the choice of a black and white film emphasizes the antiquated and unjust investigation and trial. And yet, my daughters and I were quick to note that the same kind of false imprisonment can and does happen today, especially for minority suspects who are more likely to be victims of false identification and false arrest.

I kept thinking that Mr. Ballestrero needed to call Perry Mason. Mr. Mason would have had that case resolved and thrown out of court within an hour of television. As it was it took a little longer that that in the movie version, and the defendant and his wife had to do all of their own investigative work to come up with an alibi for Mr. Ballestrero. Perry Mason would have had Paul Drake to help with the detective work.

The next thing we noticed about the movie was the rather dated and hokey psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Manny’s wife has what would have been called at the time “a nervous breakdown” because of the stress of the arrest and impending trial. However, her break with reality is almost complete; she barely speaks coherently to Manny or to anyone else after she becomes mentally ill. Stress might trigger a mental illness like that of Mrs. Ballestrero, but she’s practically catatonic and obviously suffering from something (clinical depression? schizophrenia?) more serious than stress. Vera Miles plays the wife, and she’s good in an eerie sort of way. Henry Fonda as Manny is mostly stoical and poker-faced, a little bewildered, a man who perseveres through all of the injustice of being prosecuted for a crime he didn’t commit with a certain dignity and humility.

The most interesting scene in the movie has Manny finally breaking down into near-despair over his situation, with his mother exhorting him to pray to God. “My son, I beg you to pray! Pray for strength!” she says. He does pray in his bedroom, while looking at a picture of Jesus, and the movie’s viewers see the real robber walking out of the darkness, then his face superimposed on Fonda/Ballestrero’s face. The police catch the real robber in the act of holding up a store, notice the similarity between Manny and the robber, and the case is solved. Manny is delivered. It’s a very obvious answer to prayer, and yet the ending to the movie shows that Manny still needs God’s strength to get through the continuing aftermath of the storm that has upended his life and marriage.

Manny Ballestrero: “Be careful of accusing anyone. Before you accuse anyone, you should think, because you can destroy a family, physically and mentally, like mine could have been destroyed.”

More analysis and review of The Wrong Man:

At the Alfred-Hitch Blog.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Two Most Catholic Films at decent films.

Roger Ebert on Hitchcock’s Least Fun Movie Is Also One of His Greatest.

This Friday the Friday Film Club feature will be Judgment at Nuremberg, a 1961 American courtroom drama, directed by Stanley Kramer, written by Abby Mann and starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Werner Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, William Shatner, and Montgomery Clift.