Miles David Moore

There are still a few weeks left to catch Robert Falls' production of King Lear at the Sidney Harman Hall of Washington's Shakespeare Theatre, so if you are in Washington and haven't seen it yet, beg, borrow or steal for tickets. I am not generally a fan of "contemporary" versions of Shakespeare, and Falls' Lear, with its occasional nudity and explicit sexual content, can fairly be described as envelope-pushing. But I agree wholeheartedly with those critics who have said this Lear compares with Ian McKellen's fabled production of Richard III as a version of Shakespeare that underscores the Bard's continuing relevancy without sacrificing his poetry or traditional standards of performance.

By transposing the play to the war-torn Yugoslavia of the 1990s, Falls burns into our skulls the sheer carnage wrought by Lear's petulant foolishness. Stacy Keach, progressing from arrogant warlord to frail old man, is an extraordinary Lear, and the supporting cast matches him in every respect; Edward Gero's Gloucester, Howard Witt's Fool, Kim Martin-Cotten's Goneril, Kate Arrington's Regan and Jonno Roberts' Edmund are unforgettable. Certain scenes from this production are burned forever in my memory: a blinded, dying Gloucester kneels near a pit, as black-veiled figures--to the accompaniment of women chanting a Balkan lament for the dead--haul white-shrouded corpses for burial. The last body to be hurled into the pit is Gloucester himself.

Falls' Lear is theater in the highest sense: it holds up a mirror to human nature, unchanging and horrifying, demonstrating that murderous ambition can lurk as viciously behind a polyester suit as a silken doublet. It may not be the only production of Lear you ever need to see, but it is as fresh and riveting as any version I can remember.

Here's another blog entry that isn't about much except a trip to a great city--in this case, London, where I visited my friends Jon Gardner and Kristen Hallam over a long Memorial Day weekend (or, if you're English, a long bank holiday weekend). This was the first time I ever stayed in someone's home in London, as opposed to a hotel, and it was revelatory to be in the company of people who know certain things that tourists don't--for example, the bus routes. From the top of an enclosed double-decker bus--as often as not from the panoramic seat at the front windshield--I got to see streets and sights that most visitors never experience, from Southwark to Highgate. Of course it wouldn't have been London if something didn't go wrong, this time as typically with the plumbing--the water heater went out the second day of my visit, and because of the bank holiday didn't get repaired until the day I left. But we made do and kept a stiff upper lip. A bit of the old Dunkirk spirit, what.

In any case, a performance of "All's Well That Ends Well" at the Olivier Theatre was a brilliant reminder (if reminder I needed) that British theater is second to none. It is always heartening to see the magical stagecraft that can be created (as in this production) by, say, a hung bedsheet and the right lighting. Except for Clare Higgins and Janet Henfrey, no member of the cast was previously familiar to me, yet all of them deserved the highest compliment I can pay: none can be singled out, they were all so wonderful.

This visit also allows me to observe that London, despite its reputation for--well--English cooking, may be the best restaurant city in the world, for both the variety and quality of its offerings. Again, it helps to have friends who know the good places tourists never hear about. The English have learned to be multicultural in their food--the proximity of a certain country just across the Channel is evident, but countries further south and to the north, east and west of England also make their presences felt. Memories of great dishes still come back to thrill my gluttonous (and glutinous) heart: the rich, satiny foie gras de canard at Comptoir Gascon near the Smithfield market; the duck rillettes at La Cave, in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral, and again at Comptoir Gascon; the tarte Tatin, good as in Paris, at Le Cafe Quotiden in the South Bank complex; the astonishing profusion of superb tapas--including hanger steak, cod fritters, garlic mushrooms, and churros with chocoate--at Pinchito between the Barbican and Old Street tube stations; the luscious profusion of Brazilian barbecued meats at Rodizio Rico in Islington; the raspberry-vanilla ice cream, served in a chocolate-dipped cone with a chocoate stick, at a Thornton's store near St. Paul's Cathedral; the carnitas burritos served from a van near Jon and Kristen's apartment, amid a street fair featuring every conceivable type of national cuisine. At the Borough Market near Southwark Cathedral I had a venison burger with onion, lettuce and Cumberland sauce and bought marvelous aged Pecorino cheese and an unbelievable chicken liver pate with truffles, while wondering around an incredible profusion of meats, cheeses, vegetables, fruits, breads, sweets, wines. (Kristen chose cranberry sauce for her venison burger, while Jon opted for the Thai green curry with chicken and mussels.) And beer, glorious beer, both English and Belgian, served at pubs including the Spaniards Inn in Hampstead, the Flask in Highgate and the Lowlander near Covent Garden.

There was much, much more, but I will conclude by expanding on the sentiments of Dr. Johnson: He who is tired of London has rocks in his heads and bats in his belfry. His elevator does not go to the top floor, the knives in his drawer need sharpening, he is a sandwich short of a picnic and a spark plug short of a tuneup. Cold showers and heating water on the stove for baths notwithstanding.

This entry isn't really about much, except what fun it was to go to New York--after much too long away--and see a living legend perform in a play by a not-too-long-deceased legend. (Noel Coward has been gone since 1973, but since I was old enough then to know who he was and why he was famous--and even remember seeing him in such throwaway movies as "Surprise Package" and the original "Italian Job"--it doesn't seem that long to me.)

It's no news to report that Angela Lansbury--after 83 years on this planet, nearly all of which have been spent in the theater--has lost none of her charisma or her comic timing. (The goofy, ingratiating grin she gives Jayne Atkinson, in admitting she has no idea how to undo the spell she cast, is something glorious and unique to Angela Lansbury.) It is delightful and heartening, however, to see that as Madame Arcati in "Blithe Spirit," she can still move across a stage as gracefully as she did 30 years ago in "Sweeney Todd." I remember John Gielgud on "The Dick Cavett Show," talking about his great-aunt Ellen Terry, moving paintully toward the stage bent over a cane, casting off the years and dancing a merry jig as soon as she stepped on the boards. I have no knowledge of Miss Lansbury's current offstage physical condition; all I can say is, onstage for "Blithe Spirit," she never seemed better. It is such a pleasure to review Miss Lansbury's career--from the saucy wench in "Gaslight" to the dragon mom of "The Manchurian Candidate," the unparalled string of Broadway triumphs including "Mame" and "Sweeney Todd," and the utter charm of "Murder, She Wrote," in which she became everybody's favorite companion for Sunday tea. To all those roles she has brought elegance, technical brilliance, and an astonishing emotional range. It is impossible to think of a role Miss Lansbury has played in which she didn't seem exactly right--quite a tribute, when you consider the length of her career and the extraordinary variety of the role she's played. In roles that call for it, she can freeze your gizzards; but it is the roles of warmth and eccentric humor--such as Madame Arcati--that have made her beloved, and that blessedly seem like the real woman. By all reports, she is universally beloved by her colleagues, and her infrequent interviews reveal a woman of great warmth and kindness. That makes her career that much more pleasant to contemplate--that good things, after all, DO happen to good people.

Of course Angela Lansbury isn't the whole show in "Blithe Spirit." Rupert Everett is a perfect Cowardesque cad, Jayne Atkinson is delightfully shockable, and Christine Ebersole is an enchanting champagne ditz. (Kudos also should go to Susan Louise O'Connor, hilariously lovable as the hapless maid Edith.) But when Miss Lansbury made her entrance, there was no question from the audience's reaction whom they had come to see. May we all have more opportunities to do so.

"Family Vacation Turns Tragic." It's the sort of senseless tragedy the news bombards us with, on any given day. Sometimes it's the children, or the father; this time it was the mother, a young and vital woman, taking what seemed to be a trivial spill on the beginners' slope at a ski resort. But in an hour she complained of a blinding headache, and in three days she was dead.

I hope and pray that those who read this have never had anything like this happen in their families, but we have all known families--in our neighborhoods, in our circles of friends--who have suffered such sudden, horrible losses. In a very real sense, Natasha Richardson was our neighbor. We didn't know her personally, but we knew her face, we knew her voice and manner, better than we know the faces and voices of most of the people on our block. And we also know her family, in exactly the same way: her husband, her mother, her sister, her aunt. Their bewilderment and grief are appallingly easy to imagine, just as if they lived next door. John Donne's admonishment hits home through the centuries: the loss of any soul diminishes all of us.

I saw Natasha Richardson live only once, more than twenty years ago, in the London stage revival of "High Society," Cole Porter's musical version of "The Philadelphia Story." In the role played first by Katharine Hepburn and then by Grace Kelly, Ms. Richardson glowed. She had her mother's luminosity, but with a straightforward charm all her own--a statement that held true throughout her career. Thinking about it now, however, it conjures the unpleasant thought that Grace Kelly, too, died long before her time in a senseless accident...

With Stephen Rea, Trevor Eve and Angela Richards as Ms. Richardson's co-stars, that performance of "High Society" is one of my cherished theatrical memories. I never thought until this moment, however, that it could make me cry.

My friend Chris Conlon has written an eloquent tribute to the late Horton Foote on his blog, http://chrisconlon.livejournal.com. Foote had an enviable life and career, winning two Oscars and a Pulitzer Prize, and dying just short of his 93rd birthday on the eve of a premiere of a new play. Chris' tribute is superb, and there is nothing I can add to it, except to say that it is marvelous to consider the career of a playwright so concerned with making his characters real, and so naturally a gentleman, that he declined to put himself above them. Read Chris' essay, and you will understand exactly what I mean. (My only quibble with Chris' eulogy is, in discussing at length Foote's long association with Robert Duvall and correctly identifying "Tomorrow" and "Tender Mercies" as masterpieces, he did not even mention the name BOO RADLEY!)

Meanwhile, yesterday during a routine Internet search, I was saddened to hear of the death of someone whose life and career have been discussed previously on this blog. Kathleen Byron, the beautiful and idiosyncratic actress who was a key member of the Powell and Pressburger stock company in the 1940s, passed away in London in mid-January, a week after what was either her eighty-sixth birthday (according to the British Film Institute) or her eighty-eighth (according to the "Guardian" and "Independent"). Byron's death, to my knowledge, was not noted by newspapers in this country--and also, shamefully, not in this year's Oscar broadcast. Byron was not as lucky in her career as Foote was in his, and also not as lucky in her old age; in the early 2000s she was supposed to play Lauren Bacall's sister in Lars Von Trier's "Dogville"--what a glorious pair those two would have made!--but ill health forced her to drop out. Nevertheless, Byron will always have to her credit what is, for my money, one of the greatest performances ever recorded on film: the love-crazed Sister Ruth in "Black Narcissus." To see this film is to be under its spell forever, and Byron's performance is crucial to its impact.

The best way to memorialize great figures of the theater and cinema is to keep their work current in our memories. See "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Tender Mercies," "The Trip to Bountiful," and especially "Tomorrow"--a work of such exquisite purity that to see it is to have it burned in your memory forever--and you will see at work the embodiment of the gentleman artist, a phrase considered an oxymoron in our day. Then see "Black Narcissus," a masterpiece of an altogether different sort, and get blown away by the power of one woman's performance.

Returning belatedly to the Oscars two weeks after the broadcast, I see that I am still the worst prognosticator, thank God. I had really felt the 13 nominations for "Benjamin Button" meant the fix was in, and I'm glad to see I was wrong. "Slumdog Millionaire" was a perfectly respectable, even laudable, Best Picture winner (though personally I would rather have seen the award go to "Milk" or "Frost/Nixon"). I was generally pleased with the acting awards, particularly Sean Penn's, and if the broadcast was still a bit on the longish side, Hugh Jackman was a superb host, and his opening musical number was the most delightful I remember seeing on any Oscar broadcast. (For years after the infamous Rob Lowe-Snow White-Merv Griffin debacle, I always kept the remote in my hand throughout every Oscar broadcast, ready to push the Mute button at a moment's notice.) Also, I liked the new feature of having five previous winners in each acting category deliver an encomium to each of the nominees. It was thrilling to see all those beloved actors on stage at once, but even more, it drew the nominees into the show in a way that had never been done before. Instead of having one winner and four also-rans, this broadcast reminded us that even if only one of the nominees actually gets to take a statue home, ALL of them are winners. I like this kinder, gentler Oscar ceremony, and I hope it continues in years to come.

On Feb. 15, the Washington Post printed its last Sunday "Book World" section. One week later, it premiered a combined Outlook-book review section, with a somewhat expanded book review section the following Wednesday.

The Post claimed this was "good news" for Book World fans, and I guess it's not all bad news. Ron Charles' reviews on Wednesday are as lively and intelligent as they ever were for the old "Book World"; Jonathan Yardley continues to publish his periodic essays on once-popular or unfairly forgotten books (his most recent essay was on Irwin Shaw and "The Young Lions"); the Monday mystery-thirller reviews of Patrick Anderson continue to appear every Monday, and on Friday we can still count on Carolyn See's always-delightful, wide-ranging reviews of current fiction and non-fiction. There are even book reviews on Saturday now, which never happened before "Book World" was laid to rest.

And yet I cannot help but feel that the role of both books and ideas has been much diminished at The Washington Post. On Sundays before the change, we could count on sixteen pages of incisive literary commentary in "Book World" and eight pages of inslightful political and cultural essays in "Outlook." Those were always the sections of the Sunday paper that accompanied my first cup of coffee that morning. Now, in the combined section, we have five pages of political essays and three pages of reviews. How the Post could consider this an even trade, or hope to maintain its reputation as a national paper of record after this, can only be considered an exercise in self-delusion. Blended together, "Outlook" and "Book World" look gray and unprepossessing; though it would be unfair to say the quality of the writing has diminished, the current presentation of the essays and reviews makes them appear much less significant. (That isn't even considering their reduced number.) With "Book World" ceasing publication and the San Francisco Chronicle poised to go under, this means that the New York Times will be the only newspaper in the country with a dedicated Sunday book section. Gore Vidal once said the United States is about as signficant culturally as Albania; why are the nation's newspapers so hellbent on proving him right?

The Post complained that "Book World" hemorrhaged money for years, and that publishers just weren't buying ads. Maybe so, but I know a lot of people on the verge of canceling their Post subscriptions for the want of "Book World." Does the paper's management really consider that a good trade?

When I was a kid in Ohio, the commentary and book review sections in the Sunday papers were always combined, and always uninteresting. I guess the Post wants to be Washingtonians' "local" paper, in more ways than one.

There isn't much left for me to say about the Oscar nominations after Hank Stuever and Dan Zak's Jan. 23 article in the Washington Post. The headline pretty much says it all: "Benjamin's Golden Age: 13 Noms? Film Turns Oscar's Head, Leaves Us Scratching Ours." Of course this isn't the first time the Academy has thrown laurels at a fairly inconsequential film (for more of my thoughts on "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," see the next issue of Scene4). But this year, like Stuever and Zak, I really feel the inequity, particularly since fellow nominees "Milk," "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Frost/Nixon" (I haven't seen "The Reader" yet) are all vastly, astonishingly better movies than "Benjamin Button." Yet the fix appears to be in, and I think the source of the Academy's affection is not David Fincher's film itself, but its star, Brad Pitt. The Academy really, REALLY wants to give Brad the Oscar this year, just as a couple of years ago it really, REALLY wanted to give an Oscar to Brad's buddy George Clooney. The reason is obvious: Brad Pitt is currently Hollywood's reigning superstar, perhaps the last real, traditional box-office draw left in the mainstream film industry, still boyishly handsome in his mid-forties, known more for feeding starving African children than jumping off sofas on "Oprah," and with legitimate claims to being a serious actor. His performance as Benjamin Button, which requires him to age backward from his eighties to his late teens, is a genuinely impressive feat, never mind that Sean Penn in "Milk," Frank Langella in "Frost/Nixon" and Richard Jenkins in "The Visitor" (I haven't yet seen Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler") are more impressive still, and considerably more moving. Hollywood loves to reward its own, and no one in the history of Hollywood, with the possible exception of Clark Gable, has ever been more "its own" than Brad Pitt.

Just as Hollywood loves to reward its own, it doesn't like to reward people who are not its own, by which I mean people not its own in ways it can't co-opt. Rock stars--the one group of people, except perhaps for soccer stars, who have a larger worldwide base of power than Hollywood movie stars--top this list. The Academy made the mistake several years ago of giving Oscars first to Eminem, then to Bob Dylan. Apparently it has decided never to make that mistake again. Last year it shut out Eddie Vedder (never mind that the Best Song winners last year, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, were if anything more deserving than Vedder), and this year it shut out The Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen, whose song "The Wrestler" by common consensus ranks at or near his best work. Last year the Academy dodged Vedder by loading the nominations with three songs from the Disney flick "Enchanted;" faced with numerous protests, it decided this year to limit Best Song nominations to three, instead of the usual five. One song, of course, is from the requisite Disney movie--this time, "WALL-E." The other two are from "Slumdog Millionaire," written by A.R. Rahman, one of India's musical legends. My guess is that Rahman will take home a statuette this coming Feb. 22. Thus the Academy can kill three birds with one stone: it can give a little bow of approval to Bollywood from Hollywood; it can snub one of the greatest figures in the history of rock for not being Hollywood; and it can give "Slumdog Millionaire" one more consolation prize for losing the Best Picture award that will go to "Benjamin Button."

It's not like I get rushed with comments whenever I write anything for this blog. I thought I would get in trouble for previous postings that the world greeted with a collective yawn. This one, however, I think could really get me in some hot water, because it deals with The Big "R"--Religion. And at Christmastime yet!

Let me begin by saying that the recent film "Religulous," by Bill Maher and Larry Charles, is often very funny, the work of two expert funnymen who specialize in puncturing inflated egos, revealing the nakedness of self-styled emperors, and exposing the sheer illogic of the banal homilies we live by. In "Religulous," they have a veritable orchard of fruits and nuts to pick off:evangelists who live like royalty off the contributions of the poor (including one who claims to be the direct lineal descendant of Jesus Christ);a dunderheaded Bible theme park in Orlando; an even more cringeworthy "Creationism" museum in Kentucky that shows cavemen and dinosaurs living side-by-side, a' la Fred Flintstone and Dino; the leader of an "ex-gay" ministry who insists sexuality is a choice; and, most tellingly, the egregious Sen. Mark Pryor, R-Ark., who proves his own maxim that you don't need to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate.

Maher, the film's host and commentator, skewers his opponents just as deftly here as he does on his HBO program, "Real Time." Yet "Religulous" left me with a bad taste in my mouth, because Maher chose to get serious in the end, and the gist of his serious message was this: Anyone who has any belief whatever in anything beyond the physical world is no different from the chowderheads described above, and is also an "enabler" for all the Jim Joneses, David Koreshes and Osama bin Ladens of the world.

No one likes to hear himself described as a Branch Davidian or a member of the Taliban, particularly when he knows the charge to be blatantly false. To out myself, I am a non-fundamentalist Christian, raised as a Lutheran and still with a nominal attachment to that faith although these days I rarely set foot inside a church. I believe in the Apostles' Creed and the Ten Commandments; I believe that honest Christians can disagree about the exact interpretation of those doctrines, and also that honest people of other faiths or no faith can reject those doctrines and still lead moral and ethical lives. I believe in an eternal afterlife; I do not pretend to know the details of that afterlife, though I have my hopes. (I have had intimations in my life of a world beyond this one, but that's another story.) And I do not see Heaven as an exclusive club, limited strictly to those who hold the correct opinions on school prayer, stem cell research, or gay marriage. I don't even see belief in a deity as a prerequisite for it.

In other words, to Bill Maher, I'm just like the guy who runs the Creationism museum. And, to the guy who runs the Creationism museum, I'm just like Bill Maher.

"Religulous" might have left me less angry if Maher had earned his final "Grow Up or Die" tirade. If he had played fair in his interviews, he might have done so. No one with whom he has an extended conversation could be considered a sophisticated religious thinker (a phrase Maher evidently considers an oxymoron). His conversations with educated Christians--Francis Collins, founder of the Human Genome Project, and Catholic priests in the Vatican and at Georgetown University--are severely, and apparently selectively, edited. We hear the priests agree with Maher (and with me) that a belief in the exact literal truth of the Bible is untenable if you accept the evidence presented by science. What we do not hear are any points on which they might disagree with Maher, such as the divinity of Jesus.

Maher may insist he doesn't know whether God or an afterlife exists, but his other statements and his general attitude in "Religulous" demonstrate that, on the contrary, he is quite certain only the "booboisie" (to borrow a word from another skeptic, H.L. Mencken) subscribe to either. When Maher asks a member of the "Jews for Jesus" movement how belief in Jesus differs from belief in Santa Claus, he obviously believes he has scored a winning goal for his side. Actually, his question does have a salutary effect, in that it shakes reflexive believers out of their mental lethargy and gets them to thinking about what they believe, and why. However, it isn't an "asked and answered" sort of question, as Maher obviously believes it is; to assume that it is shows a profound misunderstanding of the nature of faith. Human beings take many things on faith; different people have faith in different things, and for different reasons. Faith is part of the human emotional makeup, just like joy. A five-year-old feels joy when "Spongebob Squarepants" comes on TV; an adult feels joy when a loved one's biopsy comes back benign. Faith, like joy, becomes more complex with maturity, and faith, like joy, eventually puts away childish things.

I know many people whom I hold dear who find Maher's arguments entirely satisfactory, and whose blood pressure will rise perceptibly if they read what I'm writing now. That's just part of life; people of honesty and good will agree to disagree on many things. I agree with Bill Maher completely on certain subjects, just not this one. He is entitled to his religious beliefs, or lack of same, but I wish he would explain to me why his engaging in sophistry is any different from James Dobson doing the same.

I saw Paul Newman only once in the flesh, several years ago, at a National Press Club luncheon. He was sitting with Joanne Woodward two tables away from me, listening to a speech given by his close friend Gore Vidal. I only glimpsed Newman and heard none of his luncheon conversation, but the fact that he paid for his ticket and sat in the audience spoke volumes about him to me. One call to the National Press Club Speakers Committee, and he could have sat at the head table. Apparently he did not make that call.

That memory seems typical of a man who was always reluctant to pull rank as one of the world's most beloved movie stars, except when he could do so to help others. It may seem egomaniacal to plaster your face across millions of bottles of salad dressing and spaghetti sauce, until you realize that Newman took not one penny of profit for doing so, but gave all the profits--more than $150 million at the time of his death--to various charities.

One of the handsomest men who ever walked in front of a camera, Newman never overtly traded on his looks, but chose roles that would stretch his talents as an actor. He was not afraid to play characters that were ethically flawed (Fast Eddie in "The Hustler" and "The Color of Money") or even downright hateful (Hud, a name as hard and vicious as the character it signified). Of course, Newman could also charm the sun out of the sky, as he did in his great collaborations with Robert Redford, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting." But even Butch and "The Sting's" Henry Gondorff were equivocal characters. Less extravagantly talented than his contemporary Marlon Brando, and never quite reaching the heights Brando did at his greatest, Newman nevertheless had a better and longer career than Brando, with a longer list of memorable roles and notably fewer embarrassments. Hard work and discipline pay off.

So what else can I say? Newman had one of the longest and happiest Hollywood marriages; he was a longtime, level-headed and eloquent advocate of any and all things that represented social and political enlightenment; and any man who takes up auto racing at 40 has to have guts of titanium. I will leave long encomiums to those who knew him best. I will only say that young actors today could do far, far worse than to emulate Paul Newman. As is always appropriate with actors, I also will quote Shakespeare--namely "Julius Caesar," Act 5, Scene 5:

His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, This was a man!

.

Some may consider it unseemly that I am writing what amounts to a mash note to an eighty-five-year-old woman, but when people realize that the woman in question is Kathleen Byron, I might be forgiven. Opportunities to see Byron in her glory days in films of the 1940s and 1950s are rare in the United States, so the new Criterion Collection DVD of "The Small Back Room," a 1949 Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film that gave Byron a rare over-the-title starring role, is cause for celebration.

A favorite actress (and sometime love interest) of Powell, Byron should have become a star on the level of her contemporaries (and "Black Narcissus" co-stars) Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons, but somehow never did. To be sure, she was very different from Kerr and Simmons: where their beauty was delicate, hers was bold. With her heart-shaped face, almond eyes, high cheekbones and aquiline nose, Byron could look either regally magnificent or utterly terrifying, as the role demanded, but she never failed to turn heads. ScreenOnline, a Web site devoted to British film and TV, hit the nail on the head: "Described by Michael Powell as looking `secret' and `witty,' Kathleen Byron brought a mysterious sensuality to British films as rare as it was underused."

To see "Black Narcissus," for my money the most beautiful, sensual color film ever made, is to become hooked on Byron forever. As Sister Ruth, a brittle Anglican nun driven mad by her unrequited love for the dashing Mr. Dean (David Farrar), Byron gives one of the all-time great screen portrayals of malevolent insanity. (Think Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" crossed with Anthony Perkins in "Psycho," and you're close; but that still does not give you the overwhelming power of Byron's performance, or the unique fascination she brought to the screen.) In one scene, having just broken her vows, Byron's Sister Ruth mockingly applies jungle-red lipstick in front of her superior, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr, also wonderful). Byron makes that simple act seem like the most obscene, diabolical sacrilege imaginable.

After that great performance, alas, Byron found herself more and more typecast. Her one attempt at a Hollywood career--in the film "Young Bess," which reunited her with Kerr and Simmons--proved abortive; online sources cite family obligations in England and her inability to find a good Hollywood agent. In any case, Byron returned to England, married the journalist and author Alaric Jacob, and combined marriage and motherhood with a still-busy career, mostly on British TV. Occasionally she would get a small part in a big-budget production; in "Saving Private Ryan," she played the elderly Ryan's wife in the film's framing sequences. Her son, Jasper Jacob, followed his mother into show business as an actor and musician. Meanwhile, Byron remained sufficiently popular in Britain that the BBC broadcast "Remembering Sister Ruth," a documentary on her life and career, in 1997.

"The Small Back Room" is particularly gratifying in that it shows Byron's gifts as a straightforward romantic lead. In a way, the film could be said to complete the story of Sister Ruth and Mr. Dean, for her leading man is David Farrar. Farrar's Sammy Rice--a World War II bomb defusion expert sinkling into drink and despair after being maimed by a German UXB--is not all that different from Mr. Dean, but Byron's sane, kind-hearted Susan is a 180-degree turn from Sister Ruth, and proves she could have had the same sort of career that Kerr or Simmons did. There are moments in the film where Byron takes your breath away with her radiant beauty, and her devotion to Farrar is both touching and completely believable.

In any case, Kathleen Byron--at least in the U.S.--is a woefully unsung actress. Rent "Black Narcissus" (also available from the Criterion Collection) and "The Small Back Room," and you'll see exactly what I mean.

I don't subscribe to HBO, so I had to wait to see the "John Adams" miniseries until it came out on DVD. I can already imagine the voluminous, indignant letter Adams would have sent HBO, detailing his objections to historical events taken out of sequence or context--the DVDs' own timelines reveal them--not to mention his outrage at the portrayal of his intimate behavior with Mrs. Adams in the boudoir. (Right behind it would have been a letter from Thomas Jefferson, expressing his outrage at the casting of an Englishman to play him.) However, we residents of 2008 can only judge a miniseries by its entertainment value, and from that standpoint "John Adams" is outstanding in every way.

There were two main objections to the miniseries when it first appeared, both to my mind completely unsound. The first was that the series made Adams less admirable than he was in David McCullough's Pulitzer-winning biography. Frankly, that's the one thing I found wanting in McCullough's book--that he tended to gloss over Adams' well-documented character flaws. Screenwriter Kirk Ellis did a wonderful job of presenting the whole man--vain, petty, quarrelsome, yet also strong, brilliant, courageous, loving, and incorruptible. Which is more admirable, I ask you--a plaster saint, or a difficult, even impossible man who achieves greatness by fighting and largely overcoming his faults?

The second criticism was that Paul Giamatti was unconvincing as Adams, a slam unfounded to the point of insanity. Who did they want as Adams--Clint Eastwood? Giamatti is not only an apt physical match for the historical Adams, he is also perhaps the greatest living expert in playing lovably flawed men who struggle with themselves to do the right thing. Vocally, Giamatti does a brilliant job of handling Adams' various orations, and he brings ferocious life to Adams' iron determination as well as to his loneliness and uncertainty. The scenes where Adams is alone and ill in the Netherlands, struggling to persuade unresponsive bankers to lend the fledgling America the money it needs to survive, are heart-wrenching beyond measure.

I could write much, much more about this enthralling miniseries. Suffice it to say that Laura Linney, as Abigail Adams, is fully Giamatti's equal, just as Abigail Adams was her husband's match in every way. (If they both don't take home Emmys this year, it will be an injustice of monstrous proportions, even by the standards of a notoriously unjust awards program.) I must also pay homage to the first-rate performances of David Morse as George Washington, Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson, Tom Wilkinson as Benjamin Franklin, Sarah Polley as John and Abigail's ill-fated daughter Nabby, and Kevin Trainor as Charles, John and Abigail's pathetic wastrel son. The production is marked by its superb attention to detail--I noted with pleasure the black burn-marks on the walls behind the candle sconces. This is the first portrayal of the American Revolution, in TV or cinema, that really made me feel I was witnessing daily life in the 18th century as it really was. (Sometimes it gets gruesome: the scene in which Abigail has herself and her children inoculated against smallpox will haunt your nightmares for months.) "John Adams" is an excellent, excellent production. If you haven't seen it, rent it now.

Sooner or later, we all have to do it. I've finally seen "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in its entirety, from Netflix. It's been on TV often enough, but somehow I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm on an average evening to watch nearly three hours of Alec Guinness sweating and striving to build the blasted bridge while William Holden and Jack Hawkins sweated and strove through the jungle to, well, blast the bridge.

I found I liked the movie better than I expected, though I'm not sure it entirely lives up to its reputation. It certainly contains many wonderful things, including the heart-stopping Sri Lankan locations captured magnificently by cinematographer Jack Hildyard; the legendary performances of Guinness, Holden, Hawkins, and Sessue Hayakawa; and the film's final 15 or 20 minutes, which point up as powerfully as any movie in history the futility of war and the way it warps men's minds. But, against those virtues, you have to set a whole lot of building, building, building and slogging, slogging, slogging. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" undeniably is a fine movie, but--as one critic said of the medieval epic "Piers Plowman"--no one ever wished it longer.

"The Bridge on the River Kwai" marked the beginning of Lean's career as an epic director, which reached its apex with "Lawrence of Arabia" and also included "Doctor Zhivago," "Ryan's Daughter" and "A Passage to India." This has stirred a constant debate among movie buffs--similar to the constant debate among musical buffs as to whether Rodgers was greater with Hart or Hammerstein--as to whether the great David Lean, the important David Lean, began or ended with "The Bridge on the River Kwai." From "River Kwai" on, Lean undeniably gave us some tremendous movie moments, but also some tremendous longueurs. Sorry to you "Zhivago" fans out there, but for me the early, intimate Lean films--the Lean of "Brief Encounter," "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations"--are the ones I never tire of seeing. This was brought home to me particularly by a recent viewing, after many years, of "Hobson's Choice," the comedy Lean directed only three years before "River Kwai." Based on the 1915 play by Harold Brighouse, "Hobson's Choice" has some tartly witty things to say about the British class system, as a smart, tough-minded young woman rebels against her drunken, tyrannical bootmaker father by dragging the father's most talented workman to the altar and setting him up in business for himself. The social satire is of necessity more meaningful to British than American audiences, but what all audiences will appreciate are the superb comic performances, starting with Charles Laughton, an absolute scream as the tosspot dad, and John Mills, who grows from a scared little rabbit of a man to a lion ready to roar. "Hobson's Choice" represents probably the best role ever given to the excellent character actress Brenda de Banzie (she also was memorable in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "The Entertainer"). And who is the pretty, baby-faced blonde playing de Banzie's youngest sister? Why, it's none other than Prunella Scales, twenty years before she would write her own page in British comedy history as Sybil in "Fawlty Towers."

"Hobson's Choice" is shot in sharp black-and-white, restricted largely to a few indoor sets including Laughton's shop and the pub where he hangs out. Certainly it presents nothing like the glorious panoramas that "River Kwai" provides us. Yet I know which movie I could sit down and watch right now, and every month hereafter.

There are only a couple of weeks left to view "The Cinema Effect: Dreams," the compelling current exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., but if you're in DC or plan to be there shortly, be sure to go see it. This bracing exhibit of 20 avant-garde films from 21 filmmakers demonstrates the power of the medium to enter and, in some ways, create the subconscious of the viewer.

The curators of the exhibit designed it astutely, with an eye for effect. Douglas Gordon's "Off Screen." the first exhibit, lures viewers into a properly dreaming state, as a beam of light projects their shadows at double size onto a wavering orange curtain. From there we proceed to the granddaddy of all dream movies, Andy Warhol's "Sleep"--mercifully a mere two hours of the 5 1/2-hour original, as the naked poet John Giorno lies still in his own world of dreams. The third exhibit is masterfully insinuating--Stan Douglas' "Overture," a grainy black-and-white film of a train trip through the tunnels and trestles of the Canadian Rockies, seen from the engineer's view, as a flat-voiced narrator intones the great passages from "Swann's Way" about the twilight state between waking and sleep. And so on, until Harun Farocki's TV-monitor exhibit, "Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades"--presenting documentary images as well as scenes from the work of such filmmakers as Chaplin, Antonioni and Von Trier--releases us back into the workaday world.

To describe each exhibit in detail would take much more time and space than I have (and would also spoil the fun of seeing the exhibit), so I'll only touch on a few of my favorites. The most written about of all of them is probably Christoph Girardet's "Release," which stretches Fay Wray's famous scream at her first sight of King Kong into a half-agonizing, half-ludicrous 9 1/2 minutes. Darren Almond's "Geisterbahn" is the nightmare analogue to Stan Douglas' dream state--a darkly lit trip into a carnival funhouse, accompanied by an unnerving electronic music score. Chibo Aoshima's vibrantly colored five-panel animation "City Glow" forges a link between anime and nightmare science fiction, as mutating skyscrapers sway and chatter at each other. Kelly Richardson's "Exiles of the Shattered Star" channels Magritte as it depicts flaming meteorites falling in endless succession into a peaceful mountain lake. Perhaps the most amazing of all is Anthony McCall's "You and I," in which a projector beams ever-changing parabolas onto a pitch-black wall as machines shoot water vapor into the air. If you walk into the projector's beam and look into it, you will find yourself enveloped in an amazing tunnel of light and smoke.

I meant to write about this exhibit much sooner--it opened in February--but I found that one viewing wasn't enough for me to take it all in, and various obligations delayed my second visit. Oh well--it's still there at the Hirshhorn until May 11, if you're in DC and can possibly take the time. If you miss it, all is not lost: "The Cinema Effect: Realities," the second part of the exhibit, opens at the Hirshhorn in June, and if it's half as good as "Dreams," it will be well worth seeing.

A few months ago, I wrote about Kathi Wolfe's pending chapbook, "Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems." The chapbook is now available for $10 from Pudding House Press in Columbus, Ohio, and I assure you your $10 will be well spent indeed if you buy it. These poems achieve the very highest goals of historical/biographical poetry--to project themselves into the inner life and world of the subject with total believability, and to do so using language that is both precise and beautiful. Wolfe's Keller is not the plaster saint of sentimental legend, but flawed, at times irascible, and always scintillating. Wolfe begins her collection with "Q&A: Palace Theater," a marvelous found poem that features Keller's own words from her appearances in vaudeville:

What is the greatest obstacle to world peace?
The human race.

What is the slowest thing in the world?
Congress.

Do you think women are men's intellectual equals?
God made woman foolish
so that she might be a suitable companion to man.

Do you desire your sight more than anything else in the world?
No! I would rather walk with a friend in the dark
than walk alone in the light.

From this statement of original principles, Wolfe creates a flesh-and-blood Keller who disarms us with her brilliance, wit, insight, and romantic intensity. "They call me wonder woman, then say/they'd rather be dead than live like me./I'd like to blow smoke rings around/their pity," Keller says in "Fingertips and Cigarettes: Helen at the Cafe." In "Dreaming of Heaven," Keller defends her perceptions of the world: "What right/do I have to even talk/of color, you demand.//No more right/than you/to tell of Paris,/unless, like me,/you've inhaled/the mingled scent/of cigarettes and hyacinths/along the Seine." Yet Keller by no means is always on the defensive; there are poems of great tenderness, such as "Brush Strokes: Helen Greets a Friend": "Your mustache/dances with my fingers,/tickles their tips. Your skin, rough,/misshapen as a skewed moon crater,/smells like sun-drenched lavender." In "A Letter to my Hands," Keller says of them, "You exhale the dots of Braille," and concludes, "You'd go on strike/if I were the factory boss/and you the union./Who knows/why you stick with me?/I only know,/apart from you,/I couldn't even breathe."

As a journalist, Wolfe writes often about differently abled persons and disability issues; in "Helen Takes the Stage," she has raised advocacy for the differently abled to art--much as Helen Keller herself did. This is a deeply humane, moving and funny book, and you can buy a copy from www.puddinghouse.com.

Roger Ebert may have been the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, but Pauline Kael was the first to become a household name (and the first to win the National Book Award). Critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, Kael was a one-woman Cahiers du Cinema, combining an encyclopedic knowledge of cinematic history, theory and technique with a tart, vivid literary style and very strong opinions as to what made a good movie. She excelled at the long-form reviews she published in The New Yorker every week, in which she could expound on the cinematic trends she considered important and the actors, directors and screenwriters she most admired (or, more memorably, despised). However, readers can still get an idea of her style and her influence by reading 5001 Nights at the Movies, a compendium of her encapsulated reviews still in print 26 years after the first edition appeared.

Rereading Kael after a number of years, I can attest that her reviews always make a bracing read, even when (fairly often in my case) I disagree with her. I still don't comprehend Kael's enthusiasm for John Boorman's indigestible Excalibur("It's as if Boorman were guiding us down a magic corridor and kept parting the curtains in front of us," she wrote); still less do I endorse her dismissal of John Ford's masterful The Quiet Man as "fearfully Irish and green and hearty" or of the exquisite David Lean-Noel Coward Brief Encounter as "implicitly condescending." And don't get me started on her downgrading of Hitchcock (a petit maitre if ever there was one") while she praised Brian De Palma for doing Hitchcock knockoffs. Nevertheless, at her best she could encapsulate a director's entire oeuvre perfectly in one line; of Jean Cocteau, she wrote, "Cocteau's special gift was to raise chic to art." She was every bit as good at pinpointing the appeal of popular films she didn't necessarily admire: she wrote of An Officer and a Gentleman, "It's crap, but crap on a motorcycle." And of Easy Rider, she wrote, "The film became a ritual experience. It was the downer that young audiences wanted; they puffed away at it."

Of course, no one ever got skewered in print until they got skewered by Kael. She positively body-slammed Samson and Delilah: "De Mille, with God as his co-maker...The sets are wondrous chintzy." And she was no respecter of high reputations, as evinced by her review of Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour: "(I)t makes you so conscious of its artistry tht you may feel as if you're in church and need to giggle." And I am overjoyed when Kael agrees with me about a movie; I cannot tell you how happy I am that there's one other reviewer besides me who doesn't think Terms of Endearment is the heartbreaking, staggering, magnificent, eternal, makes-Jean-Renoir-look-like-Andy-Milligan masterpiece that every other critic said it is, at least in 1983.

Reading Kael's capsule reviews is like eating a jar of macadamia nuts: a gourmet but compulsive experience. Although you may not always agree with her, you will respect her as a cinematic scholar who despised the generic, who championed what she saw as the idiosyncratic and innovative, and who had the guts, brains, and literary talent to make her influence felt.

P.S. To update my pre-Oscar entry, left hanging so shamefully for two months: Congratulations to Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who made headlines in Dublin, Prague, and everywhere else after all.

For such an overcrowded field of worthy movies, the 2008 Oscar race certainly narrowed itself quickly. Most of the winners in major categories are foregone conclusions: "No Country for Old Men" for Best Picture, the Coen Brothers for Best Director AND Best Adapted Screenplay, Daniel Day-Lewis ("There Will Be Blood") for Best Actor, Julie Christie ("Away from Her") for Best Actress, Javier Bardem ("No Country for Old Men") for Best Supporting Actor. Best Original Screenplay is a little harder to read, but the Academy has a history of honoring quirky left-field hits ("Breaking Away," "Little Miss Sunshine") in that category, so logic dictates that the Oscar will go to Diablo Cody for "Juno." The only really contested category is Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, Ruby Dee and Amy Ryan, who split the pre-Oscar awards between them, all have a good shot. In such a close race, the Academy usually resorts to its sentimental side as a tie-breaker, so my guess is that Dee--an octogenarian and first-time nominee whose credits include extraordinary performances in "A Raisin in the Sun," "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle Fever"--should start clearing her mantelpiece to make room for that little gold statue. I would guess the same thing for Hal Holbrook, another octogenarian first-time nominee with a long and glorious career, except that the pre-Oscar acclaim for Javier Bardem has been so overwhelming.

The good thing about this year is that there was such a preponderance of Oscar-worthy films. The bad thing is that, in an awards program that allows only five nominees per category, a lot of very worthy films, actors, directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, etc. got stiffed good and hard. The five films nominated for Best Picture--"Atonement," "Juno," "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men," and "There Will Be Blood"--all indisputably deserve their nominations. Yet I would remove any one of them--yes, even "No Country for Old Men"--to make way for my own favorite this year, Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd."

I haven't yet seen the film whose exclusion from the Best Foreign Film category scandalized everybody--the Romanian drama "4 Months, 2 Weeks and 3 Days," which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and has been described everywhere it's played as a cinematic revelation. I have seen, however, a lot of films that deserved Oscar consideration but received not a single nomination. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"--the probable valedictory film of the great Sidney Lumet, as fresh and thrilling as "Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon" were 30 years ago--leads this sad list, followed by the late Adrienne Shelly's "Waitress" and Scott Frank's "The Lookout." There also are worthy films that were shunted aside with one or two minor nominations, such as James Mangold's remake of "3:10 to Yuma" (Best Original Score and Best Sound Mixing).

There were so many great performances by leading actors this year that--even granting the dominance of Daniel Day-Lewis, giving in "There Will Be Blood" the sort of performance that's seen maybe once a decade--you could make a credible alternate list of Best Actor nominees off the top of your head:

Christian Bale, "3:10 to Yuma"
Josh Brolin, "No Country for Old Men"
Emile Hirsch, "Into the Wild"
James McAvoy, "Atonement"
Denzel Washington, "American Gangster"

And that isn't even mentioning one of my favorite performances of the past year, that of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in "The Lookout." I said at the time of its release that I doubted I would see a better performance in 2007; except again for the remarkable Mr. Day-Lewis, I didn't. Yet I heard not the slightest whisper of Best Actor talk for Gordon-Levitt, and also none for Best Supporting Actor for his co-star, the versatile and brilliant Jeff Daniels, who is about two decades overdue for his first Oscar nomination.

The sad omissions go on and on: sure, Ellen Page was delightful in "Juno," but so was Keri Russell in "Waitress," playing a VERY similar character. And, going down the list, the most magnficent photography I saw in any film in 2007 was Eric Gautier's for "Into the Wild." I am second to none in my admiration for the genius cinematographer Roger Deakins, but couldn't the Academy have lopped off one of Deakins' two nominations to give one to Gautier?

Here's a name I never thought I would include in the Legion of the Robbed: Eddie Vedder. I had thought I would be complaining here about the unfair omission of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the lovable and very gifted songwriting duo from "Once." Hansard and Irglova were excluded from the Golden Globe nominations for Best Song, and that award went to Vedder for his song "Guaranteed" from "Into the Wild." The Academy, however, stiffed Vedder, gave a single nomination to Hansard and Irglova, and gave three "Enchanted" nominations to Disney house composers Stephen Schwartz and Alan Menken, who rent a hangar at LAX to store their previous Oscars. I had thought going in that the race would be between Vedder and Hansard-Irglova, with Vedder the winner, and consoled myself with the thought that Vedder's songs were very good and added greatly to the film in which they appeared. I had forgotten that, in the Academy's eyes, great songwriting begins and ends with The Mouse. I'll still keep hoping that the Best Song award this Feb. 24 will make headlines the next morning in Dublin and Prague, but I won't hold my breath.

The time you won your town the race,
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

--A.E. Housman, 1896

By now I hope everyone has read Kathi Wolfe's column this month, paying just tribute to Karren Alenier and her book, "The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas." I've known Karren for more than fifteen years now, and it's been a wonderful and invigorating process to see how her fascination with the life and work of Gertrude Stein led first to a series of poems about Stein, then to her opera, "Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On," and finally to her immersion in the world of new American opera that has made her a leading authority on the subject. Besides "The Steiny Road to Operadom," I recommend checking out Karren's books of poetry, especially "Looking for Divine Transportation." To read Karren's work is to introduce yourself to a witty, quirky and sagacious observer of life and art.

Kathi Wolfe is too modest to boast about herself, but she too is an excellent poet. Her own fascination with the life and work of another great American woman writer--Helen Keller--led her to write a chapbook of Keller poems, "Helen Takes the Stage." The chapbook was one of six finalists in this year's Pudding House contest--out of a field of 750--and will be published by that press sometime in 2008. Wolfe rips the cloak of sanctity we've draped over Keller, revealing her as a woman of fierce loves and hates, a scholar and thinker, a connoisseur of hot dogs and good scotch. These poignant, profound and often laugh-out-loud funny poems give us Keller as a flesh-and-blood woman, and stand as a work of bold advocacy not only for Keller, but for the differently abled everywhere.

As usual, I don't have a thought in my head, so here instead are some random scribblings:

1. My deep and blushing thanks to Brenda Balfour for her kind words about my reviews on the Reader's Blog. (To be compared with Roger Ebert is high praise indeed, especially when you've read his books and his Sun-Times columns as I have.) I haven't seen "American Gangster" yet, Ms. Balfour, but I plan to, and my thoughts on it will appear in due course.

2. If you live anywhere near the Washington, D.C. area, you still have time to see the very fine production of "As You Like It" at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre. The sparse yet lovely staging, with its imaginative use of illuminated panels, airily recreates the Forest of Arden in the Folger Library's intimate Elizabethan theater. The cast is excellent: Amanda Quaid (Randy's daughter) is a charming and graceful Rosalind, Noel Velez a suitably manly Orlando, and there also are two first-rate if diametrically opposed Shakespearian clowns in the buoyant Sarah Marshall (Touchstone) and the saturnine Joseph Marcell (Jaques). The production runs until Nov. 25.