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...James Baldwin and Arnold Perl, Lee splays Malcolm's story across a 40-year panorama of Americana (the film cost $34 million, but it looks twice as expensive and expansive). In the mid-'20s, Malcolm Little's parents are threatened by the Ku , Klux Klan. In the '30s he finds both acceptance and isolation in white foster homes and white schools. In the '40s Malcolm (embodied with potent charm by Denzel Washington) is a rakish dude, running numbers and lording it over his white mistress Sophia. In the '50s he finds Allah in jail and becomes a minister...
Cooper, the son of a rich landowner, was expelled from college, spent some years in the Navy, then discovered, in his early 30s, that he could write. Though he never lived in the wilderness, the Leatherstocking tales -- The Last of the Mohicans and four companion volumes -- cover 60 years of frontier life, from the French and Indian Wars to the settling of the Great Plains...
...deserted churches. He sees the Virgin Mary emerging from the sea (until her batteries give out), and he finds himself one of 12 defusers alone in a city without lights. Woven through such flights are colorful threads of historical arcana: richly researched evocations of the "desert Englishmen" of the '30s, lilting allusions to Herodotus and Kipling, catalogs of the winds that blow across the sands. The result is a realism that could not be more magical: "I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells...
Radio is the last intimate medium. For harried commuters and lonely homebodies, it is mouth-to-ear resuscitation, a voice crying in their wilderness. In the '30s, radio carried potent political messages, from Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chats to Fiorello La Guardia's reading of the comics during a newspaper strike to Father Charles Coughlin's charismatic hatemongering. Today that voice is still as personal as a conscience or a demon. Especially at midday, when the bass thud of a barroom rock band announces the arrival of Rush H. Limbaugh III, 41. "Ensconced in the Attila the Hun Chair...
...BEST THING ABOUT TALES FROM HOLLYWOOD is its subject. Christopher Hampton's 1982 play focuses on leading German literary emigres who settled in the film capital in the '30s and '40s, namely Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich (along with Austro-Hungarian dramatist Odon von Horvath, who never really made it to America but serves as fictionalized narrator). Yet an impressive cast -- Jeremy Irons, Alec Guinness, Sinead Cusack -- cannot lift this PBS American Playhouse adaptation much above elegant name dropping. Despite snatches of Ragtime-esque fantasy and an ending that pays homage to Sunset Boulevard, the drama...