Word: much
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Once upon a time, Hollywood was a town without a country. To portray small-town America, camera crews would generally go no farther than the studio lot, where an idealized Main Street stood gleaming in the California sun. It is much to the credit of Director Francis Ford Coppola that he refused to accept that kind of prefabricated fakery. Bundling a handful of actors and technicians into a fleet of cars, he drove from New York to Colorado, filming a story about a young married woman on the run from responsibility. The result, called The Rain People, has such...
...passing from the straight, hard linear man of the Gutenberg Galaxy into the noisy psychedelic womb of sound, sensation, sniff, touch and hash. But he does not accept it gladly, and the later stars in the Caxton Constellation (an English group in Gutenberg's inky way) do much to disprove his own thesis. Paradoxically, too, so will his book itself, at least temporarily, if it achieves the wide attention it deserves. "Chatter about Shelley" may be contemptible, but Shelley's chatter was often more important than most men's theses. Even lately George Orwell's essays...
...other films (You're a Big Boy Now, Finian's Rainbow) have been overloaded with a kind of lighter-than-air dramaturgy, and The Rain People sadly falls victim to similar sentimental pretentions. The relationship between Natalie and Kilgannon derives from Of Mice and Men, and much of the dialogue is sophomoric Salinger, as when Kilgannon explains that "the rain people are people made of rain. When they cry, they disappear altogether because they cry themselves away." Still, the geography is simply splendid. Coppola seems to sense that lying between the Hudson River and the Rockies...
...Vituperation, however, has gone out of style in literary controversy, and it is the thesis of British Critic John Gross that this is a pity. If men don't lose their tempers over literature (as once they did over theology), it means that literature doesn't matter much any more...
...Eminence Grise. It is hardly possible to overstate the treacherous confusion that Richelieu's Europe presented to any would-be diplomat. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) turned much of the Continent into a wasteland. Alliances flickered on and off like fireflies. Richelieu did his work, too, in a time of witch burning and archaism. His very closest adviser and friend, a shrewd Capuchin named Père Joseph (for whose shadowy role the title Eminence grise seems to have been invented) was entirely obsessed, for example, with a yearning to renew the crusades against the infidel...