Word: blacksmith
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Iron was in his name, of course, and in his family history and his social environment. He was born in Decatur, Ind., in 1906, the descendant of a 19th century blacksmith, and his sculptural language flowed with perfect naturalness out of a childhood in the part-mechanized heart of America. "We used to play on trains and around factories," he recalled. "I played there just like I played in nature, on hills and creeks." Thousands of youngsters, no doubt, could say the same; but art grows out of other art, and what opened the sluices and let Smith...
...challenge: to remain uncolonized by the New Hollywood. The best directors have been wooed to the U.S. to make the same kinds of films but bigger, and without all those people who talk funny and drive on the wrong side of the road. Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith) and Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant) both emigrated to Texas to make western romances (Barbarosa and Tender Mercies). George Miller, daredevil director of the Mad Max movies, is now helming an episode of Steven Spielberg's The Twilight Zone. This is the big leagues, with a more restrictive...
Stopping by a luggage store in Beverly Hills, Australian Author Thomas Keneally, 47 (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith), struck up a conversation with the shopkeeper, Paul Page, 70. Discovering that Keneally was a writer, Page hauled out letters and documents and recounted how Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist, had saved the lives of 1,300 Jews who had been assigned by the Nazis to work at his factory in Cracow, Poland, during World War II. Page, one of the 1,300, said that Schindler, a Roman Catholic, had died in 1974 and was buried in Jerusalem as one of Israel...
Given this, it is surprising how fresh and purely elemental a Western Barbarosa is Director Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. The Devil's Playground) is Australian, so instead of being overwhelmed by the burden of a cinematic and cultural past, he strips away the accumulated layers and gets at the core of Western legend. In this respect Barbarosa's strength and vitality recalls the poignant Westerns of another outsider. Sergio Leone, but without their cutting edge of nastiness...
...always) a renegade farm boy who wants to be part of that legend and, if he can, extend it into Western myth. For all its genre trappings, Barbarosa is essentially a comedy about friendship; both the humor and the amity are infectious. Australian Director Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith) uses his telephoto lens to caress the rugged vistas and visages of West Texas like a melancholy lover. Time-lapse shadows lope across a mountain range, eloquently suggesting the irony of a professional in the twilight of his career. He is too old and lonely to keep playing...