Word: coulds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. C. VANN WOODWARD, 91, Pulitzer-prizewinning historian and perceptive chronicler of the post-Civil War South; in Hamden, Conn. He was perhaps best known for The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which argued that segregation in the South was a fairly recent phenomenon and thus could be undone...
...towering that a cynic looking back could not have contempt for it. To re-create the bustling, politically contentious '30s, when a young Orson Welles tried to stage the socialist musical The Cradle Will Rock with federal funding, Robbins has splashed a couple of dozen real people onto a garish movie mural, Diego Rivera-style. While Welles (MacFayden) and producer John Houseman (Elwes) try to persuade their government patron (Jones) not to cancel the show, Nelson Rockefeller (Cusack) romances Rivera (Blades), then literally trashes his work. There's also a young actress (Watson), an old ventriloquist (Murray), a swank saleswoman...
...could it have failed? With a smugness that smothers the actors' energy and obliterates the historical reality. Welles is a pompous oaf, and Houseman his toady. The rich are scheming, the poor artists cliches of do-gooder striving. These are caricatures drawn so violently that one sees blotches of ink instead of quick, deft lines. Perhaps, in the long view, we are all idiots. But we don't need a 60-year perspective to see Robbins' attitude revealed in all its meanness of spirit. If he hated these people so, why did he waste his time and ours putting them...
Morris, an elegant and scrupulous filmmaker, is fair both to Leuchter and his aggrieved accusers. The movie makes clear that Mr. Death's sin was not race hatred but hubris; he simply could not, does not, doubt his qualifications to do a job beyond his expertise. Morris takes this quietly agitated fellow (he consumes about 40 cups of coffee and 100 cigarettes a day) at face value, letting Leuchter explain how tinkering with science led to his rise and fall. It's the fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution...
...youth, Lesra Martin (very well played by Vicellous Reon Shannon), who happens to pick up Carter's book, enters into correspondence with him and then drags his Canadian guardians into the long, complicated fight to redeem him. He's an irresistible kid, maybe the only sort of person who could break down Carter's wall of reserve. The Hurricane may be a little too leisurely in its development, but the unlikely triumph of Carter's saviors is an authentically moving...