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The first scene is apt to shock the MTV-generation. For 15 minutes the camera follows Harry Stoner(Jack Lemmon) during his morning ritual. He awakes screaming from a nightmare, hears the latest news about Vietnam on tv, takes a shower, breakfasts, dresses.
He, a war-veteran of Anzio (1944; The scars on his back are not skin-cancer as one might suspect, but a souvenir from WWII), is obsessed by the years of his young manhood where America was a shining example for the world.
But Roosevelt's America is gone, and so is Glenn Miller and base-ball without trickery.
His wife thinks he's insane.
He spends $200 a day (Today's viewers: double the sum): Beverly Hills home, his daughter's swiss school, hispanic maid, swimming-pool-service, tree-surgeon.
As he drives along Sunset-Strip in his shiny Lincoln Continental he stops for Myra,20, a young hitch-hiker. He is surprised how quickly she offers him sex, but declines nonetheless.
In his garment-factory his cutter, Meyer, an old holocaust-survivor and Rico, his ambitious,young, gay protege are on each other's throats. There's an upcomíng fashion-show this evening and Harry has to talk business with his associate, Phil (Jack Gilford).
His firm is on the brink of collapse. He cannot risk bankruptcy (including balance-review), and won't give himself in the hands of the maffia. Arson in one of his factories in order to get the insurance seems the lesser evil.
A client, Fred Mirrell, is calling. He buys for $80.000 a year, but wants a call-girl as extra bonus. The following scene is brilliant in its insidiousness: Harry knows what Freddie wants, but politeness (and calculation) require him to play ignorant. He forces himself to listen to Freddie's lamentation: Sick wife, good wife, but after 15 years...
Finally, Margo, the lady in question arrives. In her handbag: baby-oil, camphor, lolly-pops...
Soon, bad news reach Harry: Freddie has suffered a coronary. Harry is outraged: Why hasn't he closed the deal first?!
This evening, while he presents his collection at the fashion-show, he sees the faces of his dead wartime-comrades. He realizes that he and Margo sell the same product: Imagination.
First meeting with the arsonist. While a commentator in a porn-cinema describes the events on screen in the tone of a newscaster, Harry and Charlie fix the details. Charlie is a real pro. 15 industrial plants set on fire . Just two fire-fighters in hospital.
Harry decides to give life a chance. He suggests telephone-sex to his wife; She is ice-cold in her rejection.
This night he spends with Myra, the hippie-girl. Ecstatic from dope he plays a name-a-famous-person-game with her. She doesn't know Glenn Miller or that there ever was a war with Italy. Their play reveals two worlds apart, that only a brief moment of tenderness can reunite.
Next morning, Harry signs a petition to "save the siberian tiger from extinction". He, himself will return to the zoo...
It won't be love at first sight between you and this film. It was a low-budget production. Yet- this is a stylish film if you take a closer look.
This film is not outdated the least. It's the story of an honest man whose America has changed beyond his wildest dreams. Think of what the Kennedy generation must have felt when the yuppies took over. Or, if you're 20, look at the 10-year olds. Ten years from now, THEY're going to be the new opinion-leaders and dictate their values on you.
"Save the tiger" is also the best film about the generation-gap that I have ever seen. Play the name-a-famous-person-game with your parents/children. See?
Lemmon played for scale, totally convinced by his role. He is of such a human truth in this difficult role, that he transcends his filmic character.
"Save the tiger" ís a masterpiece. To be seen again and again.
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Crane's life was one of excess. From late adolesence, Crane drank heavily. He spent a great deal of time in underworld sex picking up sailors in the harbors of New York, all the while trying to conceal his sexual identity from his parents. Towards the end of his life, his behavior grew increasingly violent and self-destructive. He was jailed on several occasions in New York, Paris, and Mexico. Near the end, he did have what seems to be his only heterosexual relationship with Peggy Cowley, the divorced wife of the critic and publisher, Malcolm Cowley. Crane committed suicide when he returned with Peggy Cowley from Mexico in 1932 by jumping off the deck of a ship. He was all of 32.
Published in 1999, Mariani's biography commenmorates the Centennial of Crane's birth. It gives a good detailed account Crane's life. The poetic focus of the book is The Bridge. (some critics see White Buildings as the stronger, more representative part of Crane's work.) Mariani shows how Crane conceived the idea of his long poem and how he worked on it fitfully over many years. He also shows the difficulty Crane had in completing the work at all -- given his alcoholism. sexual promiscuity, difficulty in supporting himself, and bad relationship with his separated parents. But complete the work Crane did. It presents a mythic, multi-formed vision of the United States stretching from the Indians to our day of technology. There is much to be gained from this poem. I have loved it for many years and Mariani's discussion of the poem and its lenghty creation is illuminating.
Crane was a romantic in his life and art. Frequently, Mariani refers to him as the "last romantic", but this is an overstatement. I was reminded both by Crane's dissolute life and by his work of the beats -- particularly of Kerouac -- and the vision of America that they tried to articulate. With a Whitman-type vision of a mystical America encompassing all, the beats share and expand upon the romanticism of Hart Crane.
Mariani's book covers well Crane's tortured relationship with his parents. It includes great discussions of literary New York City and of Crane's friends. It shows well how Crane was captivated by New York. We see Crane going back and forth between Clevland, New York, Paris, Mexico and Hollywood in a short overreaching life. But most importantly, we see the creation and legacy of a poet. Mariani does well in describing the poems and in reading these difficult texts in conjunction with the poet's life and thought.
Crane's literary output was not extensive. Several of his poems are part of the treasures of American literature. These poems include, for me, "Voyages" (a six-part love poem from the White Buildings collection), "At Melville's Tomb" and other lyrics from White Buildings, The Broken Tower, Crane's final poem, and, of course The Bridge.
Mariani gives a good account of Crane. As with any biography of this type it is not definitive. I hope it will encourage the reader to explore and reflect upon Crane's poetry and achievement.
Crane's life, Mariani observes, is "the stuff of myth" (p. 424). Crane lived in a "broken world," and was haunted with demons throughout his short life. He was the child of a troubled marriage, and spent "twenty-five years . . . quibbling" with his parents incessantly (p. 324), before being rejected by his "hysterical" and "nagging" mother (p. 301). Along the way to his rise as a poet in his twenties, Crane was a "slave" to one miserable job after the next (p. 67), and a voracious reader (p. 62). Mariani's book follows Crane, struggling with his writing, and "living the life of the roaring boy, drinking nightly and cruising the Brooklyn and Hoboken docks after sailors, only to jump from a ship at the age of thirty-two" (p. 424).
Eugene O'Neill, E. E. Cummings, Charlie Chaplin, Garcia Lorca, and William Carlos Williams make appearances in Crane's biography, and there are "shadows," too, in the "broken tower" of his life--Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hopkins, and "Brother Whitman."
Crane's poetry is not easy, but worth the effort, and this fascinating examination of Crane's writing in the context of his troubled life is revealing.
G. Merritt
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You will understand how the Korean economy is structured and operating in South Korea and why they have the problems facing today.
Also very valuable is the part on the difference between Japanese and Korean business operation in the States. It reminds the rest of the world about what difficulities would be encountered and what issues should be pay attention to.
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An epic poem which explores America, "modern" poetic imagery (the Brooklyn bridge as opposed to a tree), Columbus, Whitman, Poe, Pocahontas, and sea imagery. It also contains very bold (for the pre-Stonewall era) allusions to homosexuality, in the typical method of the period which is rooted in gender-neutrality.
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But Clive Fisher's new biography is superb, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wishes to find out more about this brilliant writer's tragic life.
Hart Crane came from a family that gave new meaning to the word "dysfunctional," and the fact that he was homosexual (and self-destructively promiscuous -- "Poor Hart Crane," Ernest Hemingway once said of him, "always trying to pick up the wrong sailor") didn't help matters. He was also one of the worst alcoholics of that notoriously hard-drinking era. It made for a short and unhappy life, but a productive one. Crane wrote some of the most brilliant (and difficult) poetry ever written by an American.
Fisher isn't much of a literary critic, and his attempts to explicate such notoriously knotty texts as "The Bridge" are not notably incisive. But when it comes to telling the story of a tawdry but fascinating life, he does a tremendous job. While much of Crane's literary remains were destroyed by his termangent of a mother after his suicide in an attempt to sanitize his reputation, Fisher has found enough to flesh out the picture of an unhappy, self-educated man with a passion for poetry, alcohol and rough trade into an absorbing, if somewhat depressing, narrative. Mariani's is the shorter book of the two, and I'd still recommend it highly, but I think Fisher's is the one to go to if you want to know what this man was all about.
The book does have its flaws, though. Fisher mentions Crane's famous Greenwich Village meeting with Charlie Chaplin (the subject of Crane's poem "Chaplinesque"), but seems not to realize that Chaplin described the meeting himself in his "Autobiography" and even quoted the poem in full (Fisher's bibliography doesn't list Chaplin's book). Also, on page 193 Fisher inaccurately refers to Chaplin's film "A Woman of Paris" as "A Woman of Darkness."
These minor caveats aside, however, I would recommmend this book to anyone who is curious about the life and work of one of America's finest poets.
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Basically, it is the story of Maggie, an undeveloped character who takes the back-seat to her loud and abusive parents, her swaggering, self-confident brother Jimmie and his friend, the boastful Pete.
The novel chronicles the injustices that surround Maggie, who is quiet and doesn't fight back. A chilling look at poor, urban life in the late 1800's, it is also a tale critical of society's judgmentality and questioning of morality. A more complex novel than it seems on first look, it is wonderful to take apart and examine the relationship between Maggie and Pete, Maggie and her mother, and Maggie and Jimmie.
Most importantly, however, are the quiet moments of transcendence in this novel.
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Great Actor in an interesting part. Movie gets low ratings by some critics as they think it is impossible for a business owner to be a sympatethic figure. Lemmon makes the part work and is an incredibly performance in a movie that is a true insight into how the world can get ugly at times.
Don McNay...