Why was our best sex in hotels and our worst fights in their stairwells?
Major props to the Somerville Theatre for accommodating the accessibility needs of my still-healing mother so that she could get out of the house tonight for the first time in a month and a half and watch the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957), which she first showed me in high school on rental VHS. It was my introduction to Glenn Ford and my second experience of Van Heflin and remains on the long list of movies I love and have never written about, but I had never seen it on a big screen, either, and its silver drought winter-for-summer looks like nothing else in the Western catalogue. It's full of tensions and strange tenderness, high-angle shots like the sky soaring back, sweat beading like the rain that doesn't fall. It's a film about failures and fisher kings: how could I not love it? My mother had a wonderful time. I am so glad she had a wonderful time. It was her first movie in theaters in five years.