Word: caines
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Post-Mark of Cain...
...life on the road, then split. Six: Frank returns to her. Seven: this time they do kill Nick. Eight: they make love over his corpse. Nine: they are charged with his murder. Ten, Eleven, Twelve ... In bold, remorseless strokes, and fewer than 100 pages, James M. Cain etched a portrait of animal lust and human need, of mania and the Depression, of the original sin and spectacularly convoluted forms of retribution. Its narrative travels the arc of electricity from the first shock of sexual attraction to the final jolt of death-row juice. The 1934 novel was a banned...
...film dispenses with the machismo verismo of Luchino Visconti's 1942 Ossessione and the platinum-blinded glitz of the 1946 version starring John Garfield and Lana Turner to concentrate on a purposefully paced retelling of Cain's story. It means to calibrate every movement in the desperate mating dance of Frank and Cora, "these unspeakably stupid, very simple people, filled with guile and tenderness." That is Director Rafelson's phrase, spoken without contempt for his characters but with an understanding of their selfish, consuming needs. Though Nick's café is just a short drive from...
...central distortion was that the enslaved man was not a man; he was the opposite of a man, whatever that might be. His very color was a sign of deviation, a sign to be carried by generations after him, like the mark of Cain. There are a dozen scenes in black American novels where a child is going along happily until someone (often a schoolteacher) points out the "difference" in his life, which is also the difference of his future. At that revelation the child flees in panic to a mirror in order to stare at himself, to see himself...
...East of Eden, there can be no such hope. Twelve years after his death, Steinbeck's reputation grazes in the pasture of celebrated oblivion inhabited by many literary Nobel laureates. But his recasting of the Cain and Abel story in turn-of-the-century California deserves better than the ABC version, and indeed it got it in a 1955 film that starred Raymond Massey as steel-spined Adam Trask and James Dean as Cal, his loving renegade...