Word: algren
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When we meet Tom Cruise's Captain Nathan Algren in 1876, he's a wreck, drinking heavily to drown his memories of massacring Indians on the American frontier, lost in despairing cynicism. Then he's recruited to help train a modern army in Japan, the chief function of which is to put down a samurai rebellion against the new, dishonorable, Westernizing ways that his army symbolizes. In the first, brilliantly staged fight, Algren is captured by the samurai and sequestered for a long winter in their remote village, where there's nothing much to do but learn the harsh...
...particular instructor is Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), the samurai leader, who recognizes in Algren something of the warrior stuff. The American is not afraid of death. What has to be burned out of him is the desire to seek it. This gradually happens, and Algren and the widow of a man he killed (the Japanese model turned actress Koyuki) fall shyly into unspoken love...
What makes this film riskier than Braveheart or Gladiator, each of which did well commercially by anachronistically having its heroes fight and die for a form of modern democracy, is that Nathan Algren is battling for something that is somehow more personal and more abstract: a highly individual concept of honor. In the context of this very beautiful film, it is a struggle worth attending. --By Richard Schickel
Here we have our Literary City, birthplace and/or alma mater to Willa Cather, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, B. Traven, Algren, Bellow. Who gets to hang the tag on it? Carl Sandburg...
...schoolteachers, Sayles grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Schenectady, N.Y. His earliest literary influences were Jack London stories, episodes of The Untouchables on TV and the Gospels at Sunday Mass. But it was the gritty realism of Nelson Algren's hobo novel, Somebody in Boots, that first gave Sayles the idea of becoming a professional writer. "Algren wrote from neck-deep in the trash of American culture, the only place I was ever likely to be," he says. After graduating from Williams College, Sayles supported himself with a series of odd jobs, ranging from nursing-home attendant...