The Worm of Consciousness and Other Essays, by Nicola Chiaromonte. Edited by Miriam Chiaromonte. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 270 pp. Nicola Chiaromonte was an essayist in the original sense of that curious and difficult word. One feels that he …
Images of war carry a force the facts alone hardly ever sponsor. When American soldiers went to Vietnam, they also stayed at home, on television, in battle reports that droned for a precise interval and then ceased for 24 hours, …
In Hemingway’s story “The Killers,” two anonymous gray men walked into a lunchroom and said they were going to murder a prize fighter named Ole Andreson. Just what Andreson had done to deserve his fate was not clear. But he …
Dirty Tricks or, Nick Noxin’s Natural Nobility, by John Seelye. New York: Liveright. 152 pp. Of all American myths “rags to riches” has been the most stubbornly enduring. Time may be right for a parting glimpse of our cherished national fiction. …
In a Paris street brakes screech, and a man is running: headlights skid across the dank walls of buildings. Staggering, the man escapes whatever was after him, and then finds a companion walking at his side. A friend? Just another …
Last Tango in Paris is an expressionist film in the line of Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard, and Paddy Chayefsky. To admit this at the outset is to minimize any risk of understanding the phenomenon too quickly. Expressionism, after all, seeks …
Last Tango in Paris is an expressionist film in the line of Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard, and Paddy Chayefsky. To admit this at the outset is to minimize any risk of understanding the phenomenon too quickly. Expressionism, after all, seeks …
That movies can accomplish certain narrative chores more smoothly than novels is a truism, but when we begin looking at specific moments from specific films, the apparently slight advantage in facility takes on the character of a difference in kind. …
We hear a reader praising this or that writer with the puzzled affection to which American literature frequently drives its admirers, we think of the famous phrase about the “complex fate” of being an American, we say to ourselves, yes, …
Hollywood movies used to make the gangster “understandable” by allowing him a human weakness, and the same trick of complication was played on cops. The unstated principle seemed to be: cops and robbers have more in common with each other …
Looking through a good deal of the literature about communes, one is persuaded that something important must be afoot, and that the writers have not discovered in what the importance consists. About one thing there can be no exaggeration: communes …
Whether on stage or “live,” whatever the exact degree of contrivance, documentaries stake everything on their appeal to reality. The documentary sets out in search of the real world—to show us real lives, to give those lives a sudden and final …
Every age has its public drama, a scene jarred loose of context which illuminates that longer, impassive flow of events that leaves most people happily unconcerned. From the first it should have been apparent that the My Lai massacre would become …
WHEN HE SPEAKS against kitsch he seems to be speaking from the point of view of art,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, describing the stance of a certain well-practiced critic of mass culture; but “when he speaks about art it is plain …
An age defines itself by the words it brings to prominence. Idealism, as in youthful idealism, would be such a word; and by setting it against the various kinds of action it describes one might hope to arrive at a …
