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Classic Iconic Movie Festival

May28

Way back in March, over spring break, Eldest Daughter and I held our own movie festival. She had some recommendations from friends who were fans of old movies, and we watched several of the movies on her list. For some of the movies the other young adults in the house joined us. Here are my impressions:

Some Like It Hot: I’ve never seen Marilyn Monroe’s finest(?) hour, and I didn’t get to watch it with the young adults. I think, however, they were shocked by all the cross-dressing. Young people these days are so easily shocked —just not by the same things that give me pause. The movie sounded rather Shakespearean to me: all those boys posing as girls and vice-versa?

Rebel Without a Cause: I hadn’t seen this one either, but I now agree that James Dean is the essence of 50’s cool and that Rebel is an iconic movie. Teen rebellion, teen angst, parental helplessness and hypocrisy, romantic love as saviour —Rebel Without a Cause has all the themes and concern of the sixties in a harbinger of things to come. Two things are mildly bothersome: the supposed high school kids looked like college kids at least, and Natalie Wood simpered and pouted too much.

Young Frankenstein: I did see this movie back in the day, and I remember thinking it rather dull and un-funny back then. It didn’t improve with age, and Mel Brooks still isn’t very funny.

The Philadelphia Story: I thought I had seen this movie starring Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Katherine Hepburn. But now I’m not so sure. I certainly don’t remember all the brilliant dialogue and the underlying tensions that make the movie more than just a romp. Excellent.

Annie Hall: I don’t like Woody Allen any more than I do Mel Brooks; however, Woody is a bit funnier. Still, all the sexual obsession and Freudian angst and casual drug taking and political posturing both make and ruin the movie’s humor. If it’s funny to laugh at self-centered idiots whose analysts are so confused that they have their own analysts . . . I guess the point is that we’re all to some extent self-centered idiots, and that pseudo-intellectual New Yorkers take self-centered idiocy to new heights.

A Streetcar Named Desire: I prefer The Glass Menagerie for my dose of Tennessee Williams. Streetcar was too sad. I felt really sorry for Vivian Leigh’s Blanche du Bois, and Marlon Brando’s character was an ape and a brute.

On the Waterfront: I really liked this movie; I almost began to see the appeal of Brando. In On the Waterfront he still plays a tough guy, but he’s a bum with a heart. I can see why this movie won eight Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor. I often hear Christians talk about “taking back Hollywood” and making Christian-themed movies. They need to take a look at this 1954 sermon on film about courage and repentance and redemption and standing against evil. The Christianity in the film is overt and obvious, yet not offensive or sanctimonious.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: I have seen this Robert Redford/PaulNewman flick more than once, and I’d say that even though it’s very 60’s/70’s in some ways, it wears well. I still laughed and so did Eldest Daughter. Newman and Redford, frozen in time by the miracle of film, are still just as good-looking and charming as ever.

Eldest Daughter said her favorites were Some Like It Hot, On the Waterfront, and Annie Hall. She thought Rebel Without a Cause was “creepy”. I guess she has a point about Rebel, but I thought it definitely fit the “iconic” tag.

See my list of 105 Best Movies Ever —to which I need to add On the Waterfront, Marty and Rebel Without a Cause to make 108.

Movies for Resurrection/Passover Week —or any old time

Apr5

Passover, by the way, happens to coincide with Passion Week this year. I thought I’d suggest a few of my favorite movies that seem particularly appropriate for watching this week:

Ben Hur. Directed by William Wyler. Adapted from the book by General Lew Wallace. Starring Charlton Heston, Stephen Boyd, and Haya Harareet.

Lillies of the Field (1963). I love the nuns and Sidney Poitier as their hired man. This is a wonderful movie about faith and determination and the meeting of three cultures—Black American, German Catholic, and Mexican American. They all manage to somehow, by the grace of God, build something wonderful in the middle of the desert. Another redemptive and inspiring film.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972). Director Franco Zefferelli tells the story of St. Francis re-imagined as a 60’s flower child. It’s set in the late Middle Ages, but it’s veryvery sixties. Still, I loved it when I first saw it, and I watched again a couple of years ago and still found it beautiful. Mileage will vary according to your tolerance for hippie historical.

Prince of Egypt (1998). In spite of the vague “spirituallty” and a few distortions of fact, I thought this movie was very well done. The chariot race at the beginning is a nice nod to Ben Hur, and for the most part, the film was both reverent and dramatically compelling. Not just for kids.

The Hiding Place (1975). Jeanette Clift George is the director of AD Players here in Houston, and she stars in this movie as Corrie Ten Boom, a middle-aged Dutch Christian who is caught hiding Jews in her home during the Nazi occupation of Holland. It’s an inspirational movie from a Christian worldview about sin and suffering and redemption.

Life Is Beautiful(La vita e bella, 1979). This film is in Italian with subtitles; it’s about a Jewish man and his son and his wife being placed into a concentration camp during World War II. However, it’s sort of a comedy or maybe a tragicomedy. Anyway, it’s very moving and bittersweet. Not for children.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Tevye the Jewish milkman talks to God and tries to understand his wife Golde and looks for husbands for his six daughters. Unfortunately, the world is changing, and the dependable things in Tevye’s life are becoming few and far between. Nothing to do with Passover or the Resurrection, but it just feels right for Passover week.

The Ten Commandments (1956). Biblical epic directed by Cecil B. DeMille. I prefer Prince of Egypt, but no one should miss Charlton Moses.

The Robe (1953).I prefer the book, but the movie is vintage 1950’s Hollywood with Richard Burton and Victor Mature.

Jesus, aka The Jesus film (1979). This movie is the most watched film of all time; missionaries show it to rapt audiences all over the world. Based on the gospel of Luke, it’s Biblically accurate and well made. Resurrection week (before or after Easter Sunday) seems like a good time to review —or find out for the first time —who Jesus really was and what he really said and did. After the movie, read The Book.

Resurrection Reading: Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild

Apr2

I finished reading this nonfiction account of the campaign to end the British slave trade in late February, about the time I went on blog break. Then, sometime in March I went to see the movie Amazing Grace, a treatment of the same subject, at the movie theater with twelve year old Brown Bear Daughter. I thought the book and the movie dovetailed and gave me a much fuller picture of this episode in history than I would have gotten from either alone.

The push to end the trade in human slaves by British merchants took place in the late eighteenth century and in the early 1800’s, the time of poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, just after the American Revolution (or the loss of the American colonies, as the British themselves would have named it). During the decades that Wilberforce and his supporters worked to end the slave trade, the French Revolution devastated France and threatened the British aristocracy and later Toussaint L’Ouverture led the slaves in Haiti to revolt, and Napoleon became an even bigger threat to the British monarchy. Wilberforce and his cohorts, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and others, tried to keep the focus on the abolition of the slave trade, but of course the other events that were shaking their world and forming public opinion could not help but influence the course of their movement. Wilberforce began to campaign against the slave trade in 1787; the trade was finally abolished on March 23, 1807. The movie, Amazing Grace was released on March 23 of this year to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition by Parliament of the slave trade by British subjects.

“To the British abolitionists, the challenge of ending slavery in a world that considered it fully normal was as daunting as it seems today when we consider challenging the entrenched wrongs of our own age:
—the gap between rich and poor nations
—the spread of nuclear weapons
—assaults on the earth, air and water
—the habit of war.

I don’t know Mr. Hothchld’s political persuasion, but these are the analogies he sees when he compares the campaign to abolish the slave trade to the need to end evil institutions in our time. I immediately see a different analogy: the Abolition of Abortion. These and other similarities have been noted before by others, but they are striking:

It’s all for the best: Slave owners and slave traders argued, outrageously, that the slaves were happy to leave a barbaric existence in Africa, to sail across the ocean in near-luxury on slave trading ships, to work for kind Christian masters on delightful Caribbean islands. The reality was, of course, much grimmer and likely to end in disease, dismemberment, or death for the “happy slaves.”
Abortion proponents argue, outrageously, that aborted children are better off dead. They would not have wanted to be born into poverty or into abusive families. In both cases the claim to read minds and to know that death and slavery are best for another person is hubris and infamously cruel.

Property rights: Slaves were property, argued the slave owners and traders, and couldn’t be freed without compensation to the slave owners.
Unborn babies are the property of their mothers (not fathers for some reason), and abortion cannot be abolished unless we compensate those mothers who will be forced to bear unwanted children.

Out of sight, out of mind: British slaves were, for the most part, far away from England on Carribean island sugar plantations.Abolitionists had to demonstrate the evils of slavery to a population, most of whom had never seen slavery enacted nor even met a slave in person. Some of the British people may have known slave owners, absentee plantation owners, but not know the source of their great wealth. (The Church of England actually owned vast sugar plantations worked by slaves in the Caribbean.)
Similarly, abortion in the United States takes place almost clandestinely. I may know an abortionist, or someone who has had an abortion, probably I do, but I have no idea who it might be.

The Means to Abolition: In his book Hochschild writes that the abolitionists learned that “. . . the way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, but through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings.”
I believe that we will end the evil of abortion, finally, not by appeals to Scripture nor even to reason, but rather when we are able to demonstrate to enough people, especially young people, what a violent and abhorrent act it is to murder an innocent child who has barely even had the opportunity to begin his or her life.

The slaves in the British West Indies were finally freed on August 1, 1838. On that date, over fifty years after Wilberforce first took up the cause of ending slavery, nearly 800,000 men, women, and children throughout the British Empire officially became free. In the United States, during the next two and a half decades prior to the Civil War, free blacks in the North and many sympathetic whites celebrated August 1, Emancipation Day, with parades, outdoor meetings, and church services—and with hope that emancipation and the abolition of slavery would come to the slave states of the United States, too.

William WIlberforce’s epitaph in Westminster Abbey:

“To the memory of William Wilberforce (born in Hull, August 24th 1759, died in London, July 29th 1833); for nearly half a century a member of the House of Commons, and, for six parliaments during that period, one of the two representatives for Yorkshire. In an age and country fertile in great and good men, he was among the foremost of those who fixed the character of their times; because to high and various talents, to warm benevolence, and to universal candour, he added the abiding eloquence of a Christian life. Eminent as he was in every department of public labour, and a leader in every work of charity, whether to relieve the temporal or the spiritual wants of his fellow-men, his name will ever be specially identified with those exertions which, by the blessing of God, removed from England the guilt of the African slave trade, and prepared the way for the abolition of slavery in every colony of the empire: in the prosecution of these objects he relied, not in vain, on God; but in the progress he was called to endure great obloquy and great opposition: he outlived, however, all enmity; and in the evening of his days, withdrew from public life and public observation to the bosom of his family. Yet he died not unnoticed or forgotten by his country: the Peers and Commons of England, with the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker at their head, in solemn procession from their respective houses, carried him to his fitting place among the mighty dead around, here to repose: till, through the merits of Jesus Christ, his only redeemer and saviour, (whom, in his life and in his writings he had desired to glorify,) he shall rise in the resurrection of the just.”

Resources:
The Amazing Change: How You Can Help to End Modern Day Slavery.

Study guide to accompany Amazing Grace, the movie.

Ending Slavery: An Unfinished Business, a study guide on the history and current status of slaves and slavery around the world.

BBC Interactive Map on the Abolition of British Slavery.

Books by and About William WIlberforce.

Movie Meme

Feb24

I took this meme from Stephen Lang’s blog where he was asking and answering movie questions in honor of the Oscars, which will be presented on Sunday, February 25th. I added a few questions of my own.

The Oscars. Are you bothered?

Mr Lang is British, and I think the question is British for “do you care?” Not really. I haven’t seen many of the movies that are nominated for Academy Awards. I think Children of Men should have gotten more nominations, but I’m not really bothered about it.

Which of the Oscar nominees, if any, have you seen?

I saw Children of Men. It was nominated for “achievement in film editing” and for “best adapted screenplay.” And I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on DVD a couple of weeks ago. Maybe there were too many distractions, but I kept having to ask the urchins to explain the plot. I liked the first one a lot better.

A really good film you’ve seen recently, although nobody else has seen it or even heard of it:
Paper Clips is a documentary about some middle school children in a small town in Tennessee who collect paper clips to symbolize and to be able to visualize the number of people who died in the Holocaust. It was a good movie, and along with the book Yellow Star, it made my children ask some questions about an important subject.

The worst film you’ve paid good money to see:

Ever? I paid money to rent The Talented Mr. Ripley. Unfortunately, we rented it from a company called Clean Films, and the parts they edited out were essential to understanding the plot and characters of the movie. Fortunately, I woudn’t have wanted to understand. Unfortunately, we all figured it out toward the end of the film. Not a worthwhile experience.

Most pretentious film you’ve paid good money to see:
All the Pretty Horses

A film you’ve rented on video or DVD and turned off very quickly, shouting “this is awful!”

I’ve rented a couple of old movies to watch with the urchins that I remembered as innocent fun, but they were really raunchy and not very funny anymore: Crocodile Dundee and Silver Streak.

A film you know you should watch but you’ve never quite got round to seeing:

I don’t know about “should watch,” but I feel as if I ought to see a couple of movies that dramatize the horrible sin of man, but I just can’t. I’ve never seen Schindler’s List nor The Killing Fields nor The Passion of the Chirist. I can read about stuff like that, but I just can’t watch in reenacted on screen in living color.

Earliest cinematic experience:

Believe it or not, my grandfather used to take us to see Elvis Presley movies. And I also went with my parents to the drive-in movies. I had a palet in the back floorboard where I could go to sleep when it got to be my bedtime. I have this vague memory of my parents watching Elizabeth Taylor on a huge screen while I felt both secret and adventurous in my back seat bed.

Teenage movie memories:
Star Wars came out in 1977; I was still, barely, a teenager. I remember how exciting that movie was, such great fantasy. My friends and I had long discussions about whether “The Force” was a reference to God or to some pagan or Eastern religious concept.

Strangest cinematic experience:

This Patricia Highsmith-inspired moment.

Is there a film that you’ve been waiting to see again for years that’s just vanished from the face of the Earth?

I saw this film (television episode?) with Oliver Reed playing the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti a long time ago, and I’ve always remembered it. I cannot picture Rossetti as anyone except Oliver Reed. I wonder if I could see the movie again if it would be as good as I remember.

Your cinematic obsession that bores everyone else to tears:
I don’t know. I like old movies, and the urchins will hardly watch it if it’s in black and white.

Someone else’s cinematic obsession that you’ve gone along with:

Engineer Husband likes World War II movies, old WW2 movies, like Where Eagles Dare and The Great Escape. It’s OK.
The urchins are obsessed with Star Wars and Spiderman. I’ve mined about all the gold out of those two series that I can.

Anyone from the world of cinema that you have a real love/hate relationship with?
Barbra Streisand. I like the way she sings, and I think she’s a good actress. But her politics are annoying. Several other good actors and actresses have the same problem, however, I don’t pay much attention to actors and actressses when they’re off-stage.

Favourite romantic movie:

My Big Fat Greek Wedding or Much Ado About Nothing

Favorite movie(s) based on a book:

The Lord of the Rings, of course. To Kill a Mockingbird is pretty good, too.

Movie that absolutely ruined a good book:

I can’t think of anything. I try to forget bad movies.

Semicolon’s 105 Best Movies Ever

Marty

Feb13

Someone on a blog somewhere suggested the movie Marty, and we borrowed it from Blockbuster and watched it last Friday afternoon. It’s a light, sort of romantic, movie, perfect for Valentine’s Day, but at the same time the themes and some of the scenes are jarringly tragic and almost painful to watch.

Marty was made back in 1955, and it won four Oscars that year, including Best Picture. Ernest Borgnine (Oscar for Best Actor) stars as a 35 year old Italian butcher who’s still not married in spite of the fact that all his younger brothers and sisters have already tied the knot. His very Italian mother and all of his customers and friends wonder, loudly and persistently, why Marty doesn’t have a girl. In fact, they all say, with their thick Italian accents, “Marty, you should be ‘shamed of yourself. Why aren’t you married yet?”

Marty, however, isn’t married for the very good reason that he hasn’t found a girl who’s interested. “Ma,” he says, “sooner or later, there comes a point in a man’s life when he’s gotta face some facts. And one fact I gotta face is that, whatever it is that women like, I ain’t got it.”

Marty also calls himself “a fat, ugly man,” and it’s obvious from the beginning of the movie that Marty is a man whose self-esteem has suffered a series of blows from heartless girls and interfering friends and family members. His mother, essentially good-hearted but worried about her son and his future, convinces Marty to make one more trip to the Stardust Ballroom in hopes of meeting a girl. And, wonder of wonders, he does! Unfortunately, for Marty and for his girl Clara, everyone in Marty’s life, including Marty himself, is more used to Marty the Lonely Bachelor, than Marty in Love. Change is threatening, and Marty’s best friend is jealous of the time Marty spends with Clara. His mother, who so much wanted him to marry and have a family, is now afraid that a daughter-in-law might push her out into the cold. (Marty lives with his mother in an old 40’s style house, with a porch!, in New York City.)

Will Marty call Clara for another date as he promised he would? Will he continue to see Clara even though his friends and family disapprove? Or will he listen to those bad advisors and end up hanging out with the guys, asking that eternal question: “Whatd’ya wanna do tonight?” “I dunno. Whatd’you feel like doin’?”

This movie was such a challenge to Hollywood stereotypes: a movie about a nearly middle-aged butcher and an awkward chemistry teacher. And the “ugly ducklings” never turn into swans, either. They find a meaningful relationship without becoming something other than what they are. The leading man in this movie isn’t tall, dark, or handsome, nor is he witty, suave or debonaire. The girl (Betsy Blair) isn’t such a “dog” as some in the movie call her, but she is sweet and shy and rather unassuming. My urchins, who hate Napoleon Dynamite, will cringe to hear me say so, but the movie reminded me of a kinder, gentler Napoleon Dynamite.

It’s good to see a movie in which Hollywood celebrates ordinary, average guys and gals who live simple lives and still want love and marriage and all that implies.

The story and the screenplay for Marty were written by playwright Paddy Chayefsky, who, according to Wikipedia, has been compared to Arthur Miller. I was going to write that Marty also reminded me a bit of Miller’s salesman, Willy Loman, but again much kinder and gentler and much less tragic than Mr. Loman. I thought this story about Mr. Chayefsky, also from Wikipedia, showed a a good picture of his character:

He is known for his comments during the 1978 Oscar telecast after Vanessa Redgrave made a controversial speech denouncing Zionism while accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress in Julia. Chayefsky made a comment during the program immediately after hers stating that he was upset by her using the event to make an irrelevant political viewpoint during a film award program. He said, “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.” He received thunderous applause for his riposte to Redgrave.

Marty was a good movie, and I really liked the porch.

Comparison and Contrast

Feb1

Judy Garland
Z-Baby, age 5: Mommy, you know, Alice in Wonderland is like The Wizard of Oz.

Me: Oh, really, how?

Z-baby: Well, they both have a girl. And the girl has all these friends. And the girl is trying to get home.
Alice

Me: And they both go to a strange place with lots of odd characters.

Z-baby: Yeah, and at the end it’s a dream. But Mommy, in The Wizard of Oz, what’s that thing on her forehead? She has a thing right in the middle of her forehead.

Me: I don’t know.

Z-baby: Maybe it’s an icepack.

Doe anyone else know about The Thing in the middle of Dorothy’s forehead?

Children of Men: The Movie

Jan15

On Saturday a couple of the older urchins and I went to see the movie Children of Men, based on a book by P.D. James by the same name. It’s rated R and deserves the rating. The language is monotonously foul, and there’s an inordinate amount of blood and violence. I also think the powers-that-made the movie tried to inject a political message into a story that was not originally about homeland security or illegal immigration.

Nevertheless, the movie has a message that shines through the language, the violence and the political agenda. A fallen world without children is shown to be a world without hope, and the birth of a child brings back hope despite the darkness and despair that permeate the movie’s near-future setting. The baby, as a living, breathing symbol, is so powerful in contrast to all the shooting and profanity of a world gone mad. I can see why the movie was released on Christmas; there are definite echoes of the Christmas story in the movie’s setting, characters, and plot.

The two main characters, Clive Owen as Theo and Clare-Hope Ashitey as Kee, were well acted and emotionally engaging. While it was obvious that Michael Caine as an aging hippie-type was playing a part and enjoying it immensely, the two actors that had to carry the movie did so with a verisimilitude that made me feel as if they were the characters they were portraying. They should both be nominated for an Academy Award.

I would suggest that reading the book by P.D. James would be twice as beneficial as seeing the movie, but the movie has a value of its own. I don’t see how even liberal, anti-Bush, pro-immigration activists could miss the central idea that “salvation” comes not by revolution or by journalistic propaganda (power to the people), but by means of a child, a child of promise. Much of the Christian symbolism and truth was drained from James’s story as it made its way from book to movie script, but the twin truths of the hopeless state of our world and the only source of renewed hope are at the heart of the story and couldn’t be completely disguised or eliminated.

See the movie only if you have a high tolerance for violence and profanity, although again it has redeeming value; read the book by all means.

Advent December 14: The Keith Green Story

Dec14

I haven’t done much, if any, exploring on you.tube, but I just found out that you can watch the documentary video The Keith Green Story there. Here’s a link to part 1; it’s in seven parts.

If you don’t know who Keith Green was, he was hippie flower child musician turned Christian who sang some powerful music back in the seventies. For the most part his career only lasted that one decade, but he was quite influential in the development of Christian music and in many people’s lives. Whether you’ve heard of Keith Green or you haven’t, I think you’ll find the video inspiring.

Choose Your Own Adventure: The Abominable Snowman

Nov2

I remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books; they were quite popular back in the early eighties when I was a school librarian (in another life). With the books the premise or gimmick was that they were written in second when you got to certain pages in the book, you were presented with a choice. Choose A and go to page X; choose B and go to page Y. Some choices were disastrous and ended the story rather quickly. Other choices prolonged the adventure and led to more choices.

In this DVD the idea is much the same. At certain key points in the movie, the viewer is given a choice as to how the adventure will continue. Stay in the airplane or parachute out? Follow the footprints or go back to camp? Each choice made leads the movie adventurers in a different direction. The DVD case says you can choose from eleven possible stories.

The main characters are stereotypical, multi-cultural, adventurous kids who go to visit their uncle in Nepal.There’s a bold, curious girl named Christa, a nerdy, cautious brother named Benjamin, and their adopted-from-Guatemala kid brother, Marco. The parents are missing-in-action. The dialog is cartoonish; the animation is adequate; and the story, or stories, is fairly predictable. Also, be warned, the humor is clean but juvenile, several jokes about “colder than a penguin’s butt,” for example.

Nevertheless, my urchins were fascinated, going back over and over again to try out the different alternatives and choices. There’s information in the the course of the story about Nepal and the Himalayas, if you’re looking for educational value. And there’s an extra 28 minute documentary on the same DVD entitled How People Live in Nepal —which, of course, my adventurers had no interest in watching. I plan to make them watch it anyway in a couple of weeks when we get to India and Nepal in our around-the-world study.

Coming in 2007 & 2008:The Lost Jewels and The Mystery of The Maya. You can order the movie The Abominable Snowman, at amazon.com. Or go to the official website for the series to learn more about the DVD’s and to enter related contests.

Two Books by Nevil Shute

Sep27

On the Beach by British author Nevil Shute was published in 1957, the same year I was born. It tells the story of the last survivors of a nuclear war that has left enough radioactive fallout to eventually blanket the entire globe and annihilate all humankind. Almost the last inhabitable places are near Melbourne in southern Australia. The book is set in and near Melbourne and begins with T.S. Eliot’s famous words:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river . . .

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.


On the Beach may be the saddest book I’ve ever read. I’d add it to my list of Best Tear-Jerkers, but it’s not exactly a tear-jerker. It’s just ineffably sad. The world is ending with a whimper, and Shute describes the effect of that sort of hopeless situation on a group of rather ordinary people. I have a few quibbles with the way he describes it all; I think there might be more religion, and more violence at the same time, in such a world, but maybe it would be just as Shute says. I hope I never live in such a time and place to find out. This book was fascinating, in a morbid sort of way, but it’s as close as I want to get to the edge of hopelessness.

Nevil Shute Norway was an aviation engineer who started his own aircraft company and worked on the development of secret weapons for the British during World War II. Before and after the war, he worked as a novelist and wrote a total of twenty-four novels. He’s said to be better at plots than at characterization, but I found his characters in On the Beach and A Town Like Alice, the other of his books I read, to be quite memorable. Commander Dwight Towers of the U.S. Navy is a law-abiding faithful Dobbin of a ship’s captain who nevertheless is attracted to Moira, an Australian party girl. Jean Paget, in A Town Like Alice, is a heroine of uncommon depth and character although it takes a war and the Australian outback to bring out all the resources she finds within herself.

I must say something more about A Town Like Alice, especially since it was my favorite of the two books by Nevil Shute that I read. If the the two books have a common theme it’s that of ordinary people responding to extraordinary circumstances with courage and ingenuity. Much more upbeat than On the Beach, A Town Like Alice is a novel in two parts. The first part is about Jean Paget, one of eighty women captured by the Japanese on the Malay pennisula and then marched from place to place because their captors don’t know what to do with them. (This first part of the novel is based on a true event that happened in Sumatra rather than Malaya.) The second part of the story takes place in Australia as Jean comes to see that she is more than just a survivor; she’s also a builder, able to grow and thrive in the Australian desert.

Engineer Nevil Shute Norway does know how to tell a good story. I recommend both of the books I read. Just don’t choose On the Beach for a day when you’re already depressed about life and the world in general. It’s more appropriate for the times when you’re feeling a little cocky and need a bit of a sobering reality check. A Town Like Alice is useful for inspiration and a good, decent story.

On the Beach and A Town Like Alice have both been made into movies, each one twice in fact. The 1959 version of On the Beach starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astair, and Anthony Perkins. Nevil Shute hated the movie, but it made him famous and probably scared the heck out of a whole bunch of people.

Links:
Nevil Shute Norway Foundation.
Will Duquette at View from the Foothills has reviewed several of Nevil Shute’s novels.

Visit Semicolon’s Amazon Store for more great book recommendations.