Word: laura
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...done on very low budget, narrated by Fonda and Hayden. Whodunit Festival. At the Orson Welles until the end of March is a batch of mystery movies, some good, some not so good, ranging from The Third Man and Touch of Evil to weaker pictures like Preminger's Laura, Harper, Gumshoe and The Last of Shella. This week, though, looks terrific. Made by Carol Read in 1949, The Third Man is one of the most exciting movies ever made. Tonight is von Sternberg's 1936 version of Crime and Punishment with none other than Peter Lorre as Raskoinlloov, Tomorrow begins...
...Laura Quinn, fortyish, opens her suburban Boston home to Jim Cogan, 17, the son of Bronx relatives. He is awaiting arraignment in New York, charged with involvement in a lunatic guru's plot to blow up the public library. His future is on the line. If she hopes to persuade him to change, Laura realizes, she will have to put her past on the line...
...predictable: Matron meets the Son of Counterculture. Laura obediently bridles at the "spiritual onanism that leads these fools, these mindless children, to glorify themselves, or the self and its own ignorance." She is also physically stirred by Cogan, a shaggy "Montaigne in love beads, discarding whole areas of Western culture that do not serve him." Laura counterattacks with her "small focus of self-knowledge, the sweep of history," watches her admonitions founder against his coltish arrogance and her own proliferating self-doubts...
Then nothing and something happen. Laura and Jim remain at loggerheads, while a swarm of supporting players takes over the stage. Laura's beloved brother, killed in Korea, returns to haunt her. Bearing a blunted spear is her husband Harry, a disappointed lawyer-politician now resigned to tinkering with the Massachusetts Democratic Party machine. In come Jim's parents, a bewildered, gin-swilling mother and a gambling father off on a lifetime losing streak. The cast swells to include an Italian immigrant, a Jewish real estate tycoon and assorted Cogan relatives. Without warning, what might have been just...
Some of the stories of these interjected characters seem overheard; others are told by Laura herself. Their precise meanings are elusive, their relevance to Laura indeterminate. Yet all equate the passing of tune with irreparable loss, and Laura comes to understand the relationship between her dead brother and Jim: "I want to be as he is now, to crouch at the starting line and I'm furious that...