Billy Woodberry | Bless Their Little Hearts / 1984

the difference between work and a job

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Burnett (scenario and screenplay), Billy Woodberry (director) Bless Their Little Hearts / 1984

 

Billy Woodberry’s excellent film Bless Their Little Hearts is part of the L.A. Rebellion, film scholar Clyde Taylor’s moniker for the group of black UCLA film students who, influenced more by international cinema than by Hollywood pictures, focused their works on the Los Angeles black world, particularly South LA, framing their works on the family and their friends, and expressing these portraits in a slow observation of their everyday acts.

  

      The eldest of these rebels was Charles Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep leaped to the screen in 1978, starting a revolution that also included Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), and others.

      Burnett served as the screenplay writer and cinematographer of Woodberry’s work as well.

    When using the word “leap,” however, I do not mean to suggest that these films became immediately popular, but rather am suggesting the impact they had on serious filmgoers of the time and years later, such as myself. In fact, these films have, until recently, been shown very seldomly at special film spaces such as New York’s Film Forum, occasional film festivals, and recently on DVD.

     I saw Burnett’s Killer of Sheep at Film Forum in 2007, just before it was released on DVD, and Woodberry’s film was just recently released by Milestone Films, and is now available on the Criterion film-streaming channel. Both Burnett’s and Woodberry’s film have now been included in The National Film Registry, Bless Their Little Hearts in 2013.

    Yet, none of these remarkable films have received the national or international attention they deserve, and although even the august magazine The New Yorker in a Richard Brody feature on both Burnett’s film and Woodberry’s in 2017, none of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers has received the attention it deserves.

      Whereas Burnett’s family have two children who run wild with other neighborhood kids, punishing and sometimes brutalizing one another the way the society has done to their fathers and mothers, Woodberry’s Charlie (Nate Hardman) and Andais Banks (Kaycee Moore) have three children who are far strictly attended to, particularly by their mother, who, since she herself since as she repeats throughout the film, she is “tired,” incredibly tired, involves something close to hard labor.

      All her children, her two daughters and her young son (performed by Burnett’s own children) are asked to scrub down the walls of their somewhat ramshackle house, as well as to sweep up its floors. The eldest of Andais’ young girls is expected to cook dinner for her siblings and parents each night. If these children, at least, are not jumping from roof to roof or gathering for warfare on barren empty lots, they are, a bit like hired servants, put to work for the family’s survival.

      In one painful scene—which in today’s more gender fluid world might hint at other meanings—their son, Ronnie (generally referred to simply as “Boy”) is sternly lectured by his father for having long nails, ordering up a clipper as he trims them while insisting “long nails are not for men, but for little girls, and sissies. You’re not a sissy are you?” We never know whether Ronnie’s tears are out of embarrassment for his father’s stern correction of his behavior or his sense of loss of a bodily extension of which he is proud.

      The problem central to this household is Charlie’s inability not only to find a job, but his inability, even from piecework jobs, to bring home enough money to help support the children and wife he loves. In short, he, himself, has not been able to match the conception his has of what it is to be a man.

    The film begins, in fact, with Charlie in a government jobs office, where he slowly fills in an application form with his name, yet seems quickly distracted by placards that celebrate more temporary jobs. As Andais later proclaims, he is a man made of pip-dreams, who for 10 years or more has promised to find a good job for himself without any result.

    Sexual relationships between husband and wife have long vanished, as each evening Charlie attempts to hold his tired and disinterred wife before turning toward the wall in the other direction from her body.

     Later, reencountering a woman friend his has known from years before, he spends time with her despite the fact that she is married with children of her own, offering up $90.00 of his paltry $25.00-a-day take-home pay, an amount which might have paid for at least one household bill.

    At the end of her tether, Andais finally accuses him of having taken up with a woman with cheap perfume—she has smelled it on his body each night for weeks—as the two vent their frustrations and anger at one another for over ten minutes of film time.

    As Brody writes: “The showdown that results—a ten-minute take in the kitchen, in which she unleashes her fury at Charlie and they both unleash a seemingly pent-up lifetime of disappointments and frustrations—is one of the great domestic cataclysms of modern movies, worthy of a place alongside the films of the same era by John Cassavetes.”

     After their battle royal, Charlie has no choice, given his wounded dignity, but to spend the night with a friend, after briefly visiting his barber, who obviously is used to proffering advice to his clients. He argues against Charlie’s insistence that he is just looking for work; a job, suggests that he has to be able to convince someone that he has a special talent to accomplish that job.

     Although, Charlie is clearly a hard worker, he has never even pondered the idea that the ability to work is not the same as seeking out some kind of employment for which he is best suited.

    Unlike most Hollywood films, Woodberry’s film does not offer a simple answer to Charlie’s desperate search to match his talents with the capitalist system. It is more than painful to watch him desperately seeking something from his past from an overcrowded closet: his fishing rod and tackle box. The next day he visits the river, reeling in a catfish or two, and with other friends, opens up a small fish stand out of the back of one of their cars.

      The others clownishly play the hustlers, attempting to steer in traffic and walk-by customers. They do actually succeed in a few sales.

       But waiting in the car and watching their near fruitless attempts netting only a few dollars, Charlie finally trudges away while the others attempt to call him back. The last scenes we see of our sad hero are of him marching into the horizon, his back to us, having come clearly to realize that even what he knows best how-to-do means little in the world in which he lives.

     If no other reason than Moore’s brilliant acting—she played the wife as well in Burnett’s Killer—this movie ought to be on everyone’s list to watch. And then there is also the tear-rending painful story that this picture conveys. We cannot even imagine who in this film is asking to “Bless Their Little Hearts,” or even if the film is referring to Charlie and Andais’ offspring or to them as well. But we can only imagine that by the time they grow of age, their children's’ hearts will have hardened with that blessing having turned into an ironic cliché. For no one, given the racial disparities these South L.A. people have to suffer, can ever be truly blessed.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).    

Barbara Hammer | Dyketactics / 1974

back to basics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Hammer (director) Dyketactics / 1974 [4 minutes]

 

If there are any obvious “tactics” displayed in the 4 minutes that make up Barbara Hammer’s groundbreaking film of 1974, it is to put the female body wholly on display for all to see, love, and admire.

 

    The film surely dates itself in some of its early hippie-like nonsense, when women gather together in an open space in the nude, at one moment joining in a kind of Delsartean ring-round-the-rosy which, even if it may be joyful, is also today quite humorous—perhaps as Hammer intended it.

      But there is much else going on in these frames as well that had never quite been expressed this way on film before. Critic and Hammer admirer Whitney Pow describes it as a four-minute long depiction of “images that evoke tactile sensations: fingers running through blades of grass, legs walking through fields, hair blown by gusts of wind, bodies intertwining in the orange sunlight.”

      It debuted at San Francisco State University where, Hammer remembered in a Bomb magazine interview, the response was generally positive. But the last few scenes. the most serious and controversial I would argue, where the lesbian couple actually make love was far more controversial, as it was evidently even to the film festival goes of her 1982 film Audience.

      These scenes, although often touted as the first full lesbian sex scene on film, actually appeared decades after the early porno films I’ve reviewed in these volumes such as Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920), Women’s Workshop (1921), Abbot Bitt at the Convent (1925), and School Spanking (1925) which contained extensive lesbian and male gay sex; yet it does represent, perhaps, the first non-pornographic depiction of women engaged in sexual activities. And that is a truly important distinction to be made, the fact that while, as Rizvana Bradley observes, “For Hammer as for the viewer, it is the texture, grain, and feel of queer nakedness that draws us into and beyond the film’s frame. She opens film to the body itself. In Dyketactics, we sense the balmy heat of that nakedness, which Hammer visually regards as an embroidered surface that augments and extends queer modes of viewing pleasure”; it is not titillation or arousal she seeks as in pornography but in a serious engagement with the female body.

      Evidently on the first showing, particularly with the exposure of Hammer’s vagina. one man screamed out in seeming horror. The women in the audience responded: “Haven’t you see that before?”

 

     Pow cleverly responds: “Judging from his reaction, maybe this guy was Freud (“Nothing’s more uncanny than a vagina!” he once wrote, my paraphrase). The shock of seeing a woman’s body on screen, uncensored by a mainly male-regulated media, was likely astonishing; the camera being unflinchingly aimed at a lady’s “nether bits” as opposed to widely-acceptable boob shots was surprising. There were probably lots of dudes screaming at vaginas that day, and Hammer’s film seemed to point at them and go, ‘This is my body. Fuck you.’”

      Hammer herself writes: “Dyketactics … is not made with the Freudian belief that the sublimation of erotic energy into creative pursuits is the only hope of a civilized society,” she writes. “Freud’s belief is apparently proven wrong by the secularly repressive, capitalistic, obsessive, chauvinistically oppressive world we know.”

      With this short film, Hammer brought the true center of the LGBTQ experience back into focus, the body and sex itself.

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

Edmund Goulding | Nightmare Alley / 1947

born for it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Furthman (screenplay, based on the novel by William Linday Gresham), Edmund Goulding (director) Nightmare Alley / 1947

 

Over the years, Hollywood films have been quite fascinated by carney people and others who create grand circus-like hoaxes. The most notable of these, of course, was Tod Browning’s 1932 film, a truly grotesque work, Freaks. But there was a particular interest in the fake “mentalists” who, working not only in carneys, but on stages across England and the US, claimed they could read a person’s past, present, and future, or even the secrets of their private messages. Hitchcock at least twice used mediums and mentalists in his films, in 1935 film, The 39 Steps and, much later in his career, in his 1976 film, Family Plot. Noel Coward’s sophisticated Charles Condomine gets involved with a medium who calls up his past wife in Blithe Spirit, even though all laugh about her carney-like tricks beforehand. And even poor Dorothy, of The Wizard of Oz, encounters just such a trickster near her home, before meeting him yet again in the land of Oz.

 

    Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film, Nightmare Alley, takes us to both of these worlds, beginning in the carney world with just such figures that Freaks introduced us to, including an out-right “geek,” who, billed as a man who is also a beast, willingly tears apart a chicken’s head with his teeth, before joyfully taking a bite. This is a man with so little self-worth left that he is willing to play the role just for a bottle of gin or whiskey.

     Bi-sexual actor Tyrone Power, having descended from his romantic ship sails for this teeth-gritting role as Stan Carlisle, has a better act, working with Zeena Krumbein (a wonderful Joan Blondell) and her almost always drunken husband, Pete (Ian Keith), who, with the use of an off-stage blackboard reveals the secret messages of audience members that she has purportedly burned up in front of their eyes. It’s crude theater, but then it’s a crude audience who shows up to just such carney events. Pete is dying, but the guilty Zeena, whose flirtations with other men has caused his downfall, is determined to send him to a detox center and nurse him to health.

      When Stan gets news that, long ago, the team of Zeena and Pete where a high-class vaudeville act that used a secret code to pass on messages to each other, he determines to “sort of accidentally” allow for Pete’s death. Sure, he’s just trying to put the man in a deep alcoholic trance, when he accidentally hands him the bottle of wood-alcohol that Zeena uses to pretend to burn up the messages from her audiences, but it certainly solves his situation, and we suspect it may have truly been an accident.

     Stan, of course, is now the only way she can remain in the act, and she easily gives up his secret code to him, although by this time already, the seedy Stan has fallen in love with another girl, Molly Carlisle (Coleen Gray), who is currently the “squeeze” for strong man, Bruno (Mike Mazurki).

     You get the point without my even having to say it, despite the real solid budget that 20th Century Fox put into it, this noir purposely reads like a kind of high grade B film, far more interested in the sleazy than audiences of the day wanted. And, after being forced to marry by the carney folk—they know what the flirtatious kisses of the two really mean—which immediately transforms the movie into another dimension, as Molly and Stan move up to swank Chicago clubs, using Zeena’s secret code.

     Yet even that isn’t enough for the apparently endlessly needy boy from the wrong side of the tracks, as Stan joins up with a high-class psychologist, Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), just as greedy as he is, who not only elicits deep secrets from her clientele, but records them.

     “What a perfect relationship,” as Judy Holliday might sing.

      The two of them are soon telling people their own private lives in a way that the poor victims can only imagine that “The Great Stanton” is a genius “fortune-teller.” He is that, combining a lot of second-guessing with the dark information that Lilith (the dangerous demon of Jewish mythology) provides him.

      But even with his success, Stan is still greedy, determined to hoodwink a wealthy millionaire, Ezra Grindle, into believing that he is able to conjure up Grindle’s childhood love. Using good girl Molly, he summons up the girl, only to have Molly break down, revealing the entire trick.

      Of course, Lilith betrays Stan as well, threatening to reveal him as a mad psycho, and handing him over what was supposed to have been $150,000 in one-dollar bills. Stan, now lost, hands over the $150 to Molly and tells her to return to the carney, while he, like Zeena’s former husband sinks into alcoholism, finally rousing himself to seek a job at another carney. The only job they’ll give him, as if the irony weren’t by this obvious enough, is the role of geek. His wry comment when asked can he do it, is perfect: “I was born for it.”

     Unfortunately for this dark film, director Goulding and his writer, Jules Furthman, arrange for Molly to be performing in the same carney. Her discovery of the nearly now-mad Stan, leads the audience to imagine that redemption might be possible, but any cynic can see that Stan is now in the same place as Pete at the beginning, and will soon find his death in alcohol or something like it.

     The New York Times seemed almost morally outraged by this film, but a few reviewers like Campbell Dixon described it as “a dreadful little masterpiece.” The audiences of the day basically agreed with The Times. After all, in 1947 the soldiers had just returned home after a nightmare world in Hitler’s Europe. Who might wish to see such a truly dark view of American life?

     Today, most film critics recognize its perverse honesty. And certainly, Power is recognized in this film as performing far beyond his sabre-wrestling former roles. It may be hard to love this film, but it’s nearly impossible to forget.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2017).

Akira Kurosawa | どん底 (Donzoko) (The Lower Depths) / 1957

being here

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hideo Oguni (screenplay, based on the drama by Maxim Gorky), Akira Kurosawa (director) どん底 (Donzoko) (The Lower Depths) / 1957

 

Watching Akira Kurosawa’s impressive 1957 film version of Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths the other day, I was reminded of my first encounter with this drama on a filmed production of the play on TV, which I must have seen in the very late 1950s or, more likely, in

the early 1960s. Yet, when I went to look it up on internet connections, I could find no sign of it, no matter where I looked. So much for the “golden age of TV,” which, of course, we know is long gone, but now is also evidently utterly forgotten. *

     I even wrote a Facebook note to my 3,000-some friends, asking for any confirmation of what surely cannot have been a made-up memory. I had never read the play, and yet I remember it so fondly, despite its dark, dark themes and images. I suppose I might have loved any theatrical event, since in the eastern Iowa I had few other opportunities to explore the theater that I so very much loved.

     Fortunately, we have wonderful versions of this work on film, including Jean Renoir’s 1936 version and Kurosawa’s translation of Gorky’s drama into Endo (19th century Tokyo).

      In some respects, Kurosawa’s damned, poverty-stricken untouchables are even worse off that Gorky’s poor peasants, who inhabit the denizens of the Bugrov Homeless Shelter near the Volga. In the Japanese director’s world the scum of the earth—prostitutes, drunks, gamblers, aging actors, tinkers, and others who have nowhere else to go—are gathered into a pit of what seems to have once been a grand house, hallowed out into tiny closets where they live, if the communal world of noise and violence can be described as a way of living.

      Indeed, one of their group, Asa (Eiko Miyoshi), the tinker, Tomekichi’s wife, is dying while he continues to hammer out a pot, causing everyone to suffer through his endless actions. Even though they seem to be a group of survivors, they all know they are also near death, to be killed at any moment like the thief,

     Sutekichi (the always magnificent Toshiro Mifune) or the drunks who play cards while waiting around for their next drink, provided by a few pennies from a friend or benefactor like Sutekichi.

    They also know that the society above them, the “out there” of which they constantly speak could care less about their existence, a fact which the director makes clear from the very first moments of his film, where we move down the ravine from a stand of beautiful trees where the wealthy live to a Buddhist retreat below, who readily throw their slops into the pitiful encampment of those locked away in the “in here” existence.

      But even “in here,” those on top of the society, the landlord and his truly nasty wife Osugi (Isuzu Yamada), attempt to recreate the societal divisions of the world “out there,” giving their love to, as she does, to Sutekichi, while continually demanding the rent of a few pennies from the rest. The structure that destroys these people on the “outside” exists “inside” as well. And it is Osugi’s machinations that determines the thin plot of this story, alternating between her jealousy of Sutekichi’s attentions to her sister, which leads to her plotting for her former lover’s downfall.

      Gorky’s drama, however, was never about narrative, in the traditional sense, but about the narrative of numerous broken and destroyed lives, lives made impossible to even live by the society at large. The fact that Sutekichi ultimately is caught in his own web of deceit and actual validation of his humanity hardly matters. It is the little gestures this downtrodden society gift to their fellow sufferers that truly separates them, “in here,” from those “out there.”

     The candy seller, Otaki (Nijiko Kiyokawa) offers up a small fortune of candy to the dying Asa. The actor who tragically can no longer remember his lines (Kamatari Fujiwara) plays out a dramatic role, as Keiko McDonald and Thomas Rimer have made clear, performing from the michiyuki tradition, as he walks his “lover” to her death, reveals his caring and charm. Even if he cannot recall his lines, he can relive the Kabuki gestures.

      Sutekichi gives some of his ill-got gains to the drunkards to help them get through just another day. And, most importantly, the new guest to this hellish world, the pilgrim Kahei (Bokuzen Hidari) offers something to everyone, a dream of afterlife to Asa, a possibility of recovery and memory to the actor, and even possible redemption to Sutekichi. If some don’t have much to give, they offer, at the very least, their companionship. And even the seemingly uncaring tinker, after his wife dies, offers his suffering in her memory. In Kurosawa’s musical-comedy rendering of Gorky’s so very sad tale redeems the society at the very bottom of the culture, and suggests that it is far more giving and even resilient than the social structures who have demanded their destruction. 

     If Kurosawa’s film reveals an ugly cancer of the society at large, within this small community of the dying sufferers, there is, at every moment, a sense of possible relief, a loving of being, the possibility of true forgiveness. And, particularly in this director’s vision, there is always a great comic possibility as the universe seemingly pushes out to destroy them: commenting on the shocking suicide of the actor, the gambler sarcastically but brilliantly comments: “It was such a great party. Then he had to go and ruin everything.”

     Obviously, this world is already in deep ruin; no sliding door can fully close, the shreds of cloth that others have used to close out the terrible noises of their hell can’t keep them safe. But their illusions are all that they have left. Why go and spoil them, the realist gambler seems to be saying. Isn’t that notion on which we all survive—even at the top?

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2018).

 

*After several days of Facebook queries, my friend, Kirk de Gooyer, sent me a link with a BBC-Sunday Night Theatre production of The Lower Depths from 1958, that clearly corresponded to the TV performance I had seen back in Marion, Iowa, emanating, probably, from the NBC station in Waterloo, Iowa. I was a bit amazed, but not even surprised, that I had encountered that memorable production at age 11, since the years of 10-11 when I first became, as I express it, addicted to theater. Yes, that would have been precisely the time when I was most receptive to such a theatrical production.

      But, nonetheless, I was touched by the fact, that at such an early age I had been so transformed by this theatrical production, coming out of Britain, not from US stations. I wrote Kirk: “Hard to imagine how much influence BBC had to broadcast a production into Cedar Rapids, Iowa (or maybe nearby Waterloo) to affect a young man so desperate to experience it. It just seems impossible. But there it is.”

     I didn’t hallucinate that production—why would an 11-year-old imagine he had seen a play he never had previously known about? I had seen this BBC performance where no one I knew might even be interested in it! It appears, in long retrospect, it was a gift to me—and a few others who must have experienced it. Thank heaven for those television gods who dared to show such theatrical works. They could not have imagined how significant it was to the few! I must admit that I shed a few tears in recognizing the discovery that I truly had experienced what I so fondly remembered—particularly in a time when so many of my generation are beginning to forget.

     I’ve claimed throughout these pages that I have an incredible memory, yet I always fear, obviously, that this will begin to disappear. My entire goal in the My Year volumes is an attempt to remember what others have forgotten. Thanks to Kirk, I have remembered once again, reconfirming that “I’m still here.”

Alexander Korda | An Ideal Husband / 1947

a wilde beating

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lajos Biró (screenplay, based on the play by Oscar Wilde), Alexander Korda (director) An Ideal Husband / 1947, USA 1948

 

I generally have enjoyed Alexander Korda’s stylish comedies, and I’ve always enjoyed the plays of Oscar Wilde, so it was with expected pleasure that I determined yesterday to watch Korda’s version of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. In the first few moments, I was enchanted by Glynis Johns’ (playing Mabel Chiltern) witty rejoinders about what she wanted in a husband and life (“But, I love London society. I think it immensely improved. It is now entirely composed of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be!”); but I soon began to think that perhaps I had clicked on the wrong Filmstruck movie, as things quickly turned more serious and ponderous than I had ever imagined a Wilde play to have been.

     Well, things are somewhat serious for Sir Robert Chiltern (Hugh Williams), who as a young man, evidently, had passed on secret government information to his one-time mentor, resulting in a large profit for his friend and significant payment for himself, which established his now quite polished and pristine career as well as the mansion in which he and his “saintly” wife, Lady Chiltern (Diana Wynyarad), now live and in which they are currently celebrating a large dinner party.

      To that party, unexpectedly, Mrs. Cheveley (Paulette Goddard) arrives, being reminded by the hostess that they attended school together; Lady Chiltern has bitter memories about her beautifully dressed attendee, recalling that Cheveley had been dismissed from school, something that the pious Ladyship can ever forget. Cheveley is there for one purpose only: to blackmail Sir Robert into changing his mind about a vague—and evidently corrupt—proposal to create a canal in Argentina.

    The very idea that anyone might imagine the need for a major canal so far south in Western Hemisphere and which, presumably would have to also slice through Chile, is worthy of the best of Wildean wit. But in Korda’s version everything is taken so utterly seriously that any possible humor has been drained, and even the ludicrous project is represented as something worthy of further study.              Sir Robert is not presented simply a youthful sinner (he was only 22 at the time of the letter i n Mrs. Cheveley’s possession)—in short, a not so “ideal husband"—but as a smug adult determined to maintain his unblemished position at all cost. His wife is just the kind of saintly prig that women of the world like Mrs. Cheveley love to hate; but even the vixen of Wilde’s play comes off as a sinister whore instead of the worldly “do-badder” than I am sure he intended her to have been. Other than she has invested in the project, we can perceive absolutely no reason, other than revenge, for her blackmail; certainly, as she proclaims, she has all the money she might possibly need for life.

     In Wilde’s original, I presume, she was a kind of—as Hitchcock describes it—“macguffin,” a person or object that keeps the plot going. But here, everything turns quite serious and dark—wit, evidently, having been by Korda banned on the set.

  

    Even Wilde’s usually “gay” bachelor, Lord Goring (Michael Wilding) takes his role so seriously that you might actually suspect that he is truly in love with Lady Chiltern, instead of her empty-minded sister-in-law. And when Lady Chiltern determines to seek out his help in her husband’s crisis, we, a bit like Mrs. Cheveley actually do suspect that “something’s up,” particularly when she cancels her visit for little apparent reason than it may have been intemperate.

      The trouble is with this leaden version of a comic mix-up of character and events is that nothing is up. And poor Mabel is left to spout her comic lines of lovers and husbands all alone, with no one left in the room to even wink. I was sure that, at any moment, both the elder Chiltern’s might break into tears.

      In the end, Korda’s Wilde is so unmemorable that I was startled to see that I had checked off the title in my Time Out Film Guide, an indication that I have seen a movie at least once. I had totally forgotten it. And I had to write this piece early the next morning before I might succeed in forgetting it once again.

      Cecil Beaton’s costumes are stunningly beautiful, appropriately draping the evil blackmailer in emerald green, while embalming the Chilterns in black and blue as if they have both been just beaten up. Vincent Korda’s sets are very well done. If only the human beings might have come alive on the set, everything would have been just swell. As it is, Wilde plays here more like John Galsworthy.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2017).