I'd never heard of this film (or the book it was based on).
I found the film through Alexander Knox, but once it turned out that I could wait for the novel to arrive from Clark University and then try not to accelerate the divorce of its spine and covers in a mess of strings, I read it first. I'm not sure why either is so obscure! The Hero is very much the sort of social protest document by a prominent twentieth-century artist and a thoughtful story besides that should be in print with a nice introduction. Lampell could write prose, not just songs:
"You Are Now Entering White Falls. Pop. 21,000.
"The mill town with its meaningless name. White Falls. And nothing is white. There are no falls. Only the curving Passaic River, green and sluggish, stained with oily patches of red and yellow, refuse from the dye shops.
"Railroad tracks circle the town like a long black scar. The flat, ugly houses of the dye workers stretch in similar lines, every house the same, the upper story brown and the lower tan, with peeling paint and small, untidy yards. An uneven row of garbage cans sags along the gutter like a line of sick and beaten old soldiers awaiting the signal for a last retreat across the torn fields of orange rinds and eggshells.
"In White Falls the seasons come without poetry, a kind of secondhand spring and summer riding in on the stale wind across the Jersey marshes.
"It was summer, a glaring afternoon in late August. A battered delivery truck raced through the back streets of town. Steve Novak sat tense at the wheel, praying, Holy Mary, Mother of God, let them be there! Honest to God, I'll never ask for anything again. Only just this once, let them be there!"
TCM must have some kind of rights to Saturday's Hero to have shown it, but it is currently a streaming bust and the DVDs I could find looked extremely bootleg. It wasn't part of last year's series of Columbia rarities at the HFA. I would not actually describe it as a noir despite its definitional skepticism of the American dream, but at this point I feel my best chance of seeing a copy that doesn't look like it went through a spin cycle may be Noir Alley. The thought that there's still some kind of McCarthyist hangover is unacceptable.
I enjoyed reading about Professor Megroth!
I really like him! He's pricklier and much less social than his counterpart in the novel and it's a good effect not just because it strengthens his bond with Steve, but because it makes him look as if he's waking up to some myths of his own when he lets himself show that he cares about books, about people, about the construction of the world.
The Red Scare used to seem so much further away than it does these days.
It started me listening to Steve Goodman. Does anybody seem to know where did the twentieth century go? Or most of the twenty-first?
no subject
I found the film through Alexander Knox, but once it turned out that I could wait for the novel to arrive from Clark University and then try not to accelerate the divorce of its spine and covers in a mess of strings, I read it first. I'm not sure why either is so obscure! The Hero is very much the sort of social protest document by a prominent twentieth-century artist and a thoughtful story besides that should be in print with a nice introduction. Lampell could write prose, not just songs:
"You Are Now Entering White Falls. Pop. 21,000.
"The mill town with its meaningless name. White Falls. And nothing is white. There are no falls. Only the curving Passaic River, green and sluggish, stained with oily patches of red and yellow, refuse from the dye shops.
"Railroad tracks circle the town like a long black scar. The flat, ugly houses of the dye workers stretch in similar lines, every house the same, the upper story brown and the lower tan, with peeling paint and small, untidy yards. An uneven row of garbage cans sags along the gutter like a line of sick and beaten old soldiers awaiting the signal for a last retreat across the torn fields of orange rinds and eggshells.
"In White Falls the seasons come without poetry, a kind of secondhand spring and summer riding in on the stale wind across the Jersey marshes.
"It was summer, a glaring afternoon in late August. A battered delivery truck raced through the back streets of town. Steve Novak sat tense at the wheel, praying, Holy Mary, Mother of God, let them be there! Honest to God, I'll never ask for anything again. Only just this once, let them be there!"
TCM must have some kind of rights to Saturday's Hero to have shown it, but it is currently a streaming bust and the DVDs I could find looked extremely bootleg. It wasn't part of last year's series of Columbia rarities at the HFA. I would not actually describe it as a noir despite its definitional skepticism of the American dream, but at this point I feel my best chance of seeing a copy that doesn't look like it went through a spin cycle may be Noir Alley. The thought that there's still some kind of McCarthyist hangover is unacceptable.
I enjoyed reading about Professor Megroth!
I really like him! He's pricklier and much less social than his counterpart in the novel and it's a good effect not just because it strengthens his bond with Steve, but because it makes him look as if he's waking up to some myths of his own when he lets himself show that he cares about books, about people, about the construction of the world.
The Red Scare used to seem so much further away than it does these days.
It started me listening to Steve Goodman. Does anybody seem to know where did the twentieth century go? Or most of the twenty-first?