Word: maxims
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years after Gorky's death, director Mark Donskoy began to film the trilogy of which The Childhood of Maxim Gorky is the first part. It is a wonderful film and well deserves the publicity the Brattle has given it. Full of characters that have since become types, the movie evoked, in Eric Erickson's Childhood and Society, a long analysis of the Russian mind. If only in one respect, Erickson is right: the movie is full of Russian life. Each frame is itself a picture; and most are crowded with Gorky's friends, the laborers, convicts, beggars, merchants, clowns...
Autobiography was Maxim Gorky's surest talent, but he did not discover it until he was nearly fifty. By that time he had found ways of using his great memory less to preach than to describe. As he wrote in his Autobiography: "I imagine myself in my childhood, as a hive to which all manner of simple people brought, as the bees bring honey, their knowledge and thoughts about life, generously enriching my soul with what they had to give. The honey was often dirty, and bitter, but it was all the same knowledge--and honey...
Tomorrow the Brattle officially celebrates its fourth anniversary with a film which in many ways exemplifies the attitude of the Brattle management: "The Childhood of Maxim Gorky," a Russian film made in the late '30's and never shown in New England before, and furthermore a film the Brattle considers one of the three or four greatest movies ever made, but which they dolefully expect will do very poor business...
...with all its problems, the Brattle has no intention of closing its doors, and is now busily booking its spring season. They will celebrate their fourth birthday quietly tomorrow with a private showing of "The Childhood of Maxim Gorky" for a few friends of the theatre, and hope that the mysterious force "The Public" may surprise them and like the film
...court for conspiring with the A. & P. chain-store firm to violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (he set up dummy trade and citizens' groups, helped keep in committee a New York State tax bill that would have cost A. & P. $2,000,000 a year). A Byoir maxim: "If the truth doesn't sound believable, don't tell...