Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Otto Preminger is the celebrity guest on To Tell the Truth. The panelists are Orson Bean, Peggy Cass, Kitty Carlisle, and Tom Poston, and Bud Collyer is the host. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on November 8, 1965. Preminger’s segment stars at 16:25:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Put differently, religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.”
Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
From 2008:
In private life Dick was as dapper as his playing, and old-fashioned in all the best ways. He liked Chicago-style jazz, British tailoring, black-and-white movies, Marmite, and The New Yorker before Tina Brown got her hands on it. Not surprisingly, he was more than a little bit at odds with much of the modern world, and I suspect that he would have been vastly happier had he been born in 1908 instead of 1938. He was also a pessimist by nature, but like many such folks, he gave more pleasure than he got–and, I suspect, got more pleasure than he usually cared to admit….
Read the whole thing here
“Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty
Titus Techera, who hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation on which he and his guests discuss important films of the past and present, invited me back to talk about Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground on his latest episode. Our hour-long chat is now available on line.
Titus and I spoke at length and in detail about the 1951 film, produced by John Houseman, which starred Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, and Ward Bond, was written by A.I. Bezzerides and Ray, and features a sublime musical score by Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock’s close collaborator. While it was only modestly successful on its original release, On Dangerous Ground is now widely regarded by English-speaking critics as one of Hollywood’s film-noir masterpieces.
Here’s part of Titus’ summary of our conversation:
Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, the best Robert Ryan noir…moves between social criticism and romanticism effortlessly, the tragic story of a man who believes in justice and who learns to believe in innocence, too. We talk about the many attractions of the movie—Ida Lupino, the Bernard Herrmann score, George Diskant’s cinematography, Ward Bond’s remarkable portrayal of a father mad to avenge his daughter’s murder—and we also talk about noir, genre pictures, social criticism, how America learned about tragedy in World War II, and the new depth of character in story-telling this ushered in.
To listen to or download this episode, go here.
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The original theatrical trailer for On Dangerous Ground:
A scene from the film, featuring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino and scored by Bernard Herrmann. The viola d’amore heard on the soundtrack is played by Virginia Majewski:
Lenny Breau plays a solo version of his own “Taranta,” followed by a performance of Toots Thieleman’s “Bluesette” accompanied by his trio. This performance was originally telecast on the CBC in 1966:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Only dreamers believe in ways out. Optimism is cowardice.”
Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (trans. Charles Francis Atkinson)
I’m very, very pleased to report that Mrs. T is getting better, slowly but—it appears—surely. Two weeks after her release from New York-Presbyterian Hospital, her stamina is gradually increasing and her spirits are quite good. It helps greatly, of course, that she’s (A) not dead and (B) back in our New York apartment again. She spent the better part of a month in a pair of windowless intensive-care units in which the doctors and nurses, competent and caring though they were, seem to have gone out of their way to wake her up whenever she fell asleep. As for the food…well, we’ll skip over that. Things are much nicer at home, where we can sit on the couch together, watch movies, and dine on home cooking, some of it prepared by the two of us and some by a neighborhood friend.
So far Mrs. T hasn’t felt up to leaving the apartment for anything other than follow-up visits to her doctors at New York-Presbyterian, but we’re planning a visit to our Connecticut farmhouse, where we’ll drive around the countryside, open the mail, and enjoy the quiet pleasures of being elsewhere. We’ve also scheduled an October visit to Philadelphia’s Penn Transplant Institute in order to resume the process of getting her listed for transplant there (she’s already listed in New York).
My own life, which was turned upside down when my beloved spouse was taken ill without warning in Cape May last month, has started to right itself. I’m seeing friends and going to shows again, and later today I’ll be taping the latest in an occasional series of podcasts in which Titus Techera and I talk about films (we’re discussing Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground). As for Three on the Aisle, which has been on a brief hiatus, Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are recording a brand-new episode next week.
To the countless people who sent their good wishes to the two of us, we are and will always be grateful beyond words. You warmed our hearts at a time when the world looked dark. Yes, we still have a long, unpredictable slog ahead of us, but we are both full of hope.