THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/26/08 -- Vol. 27, No. 13, Whole Number 1512
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent will be assumed authorized for inclusion
unless otherwise noted.
To subscribe, send mail to mtvoid-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To unsubscribe, send mail to mtvoid-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Topics:
A Fun Quiz
Polish Film Posters (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Is No Joke (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Sword and Sandal Films (film comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Macs Redux (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1924) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
IRRELIGION by John Allen Paulos (book review
by Mark R. Leeper)
THE BEAT GENERATION (letters of comment by Peter Rubinstein
and Taras Wolansky)
Blatant Prejudice (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
This Week's Reading (THE VALLEY-WESTSIDE WAR, PLAYBACK,
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and AIRPLANE!)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Fun Quiz
Try to name all fifty states in ten minutes:
http://www.ironicsans.com/state22.html.
===================================================================
TOPIC: Polish Film Posters (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Poland apparently releases international films but does their own
film posters. This may be for many reasons, but one is that they
are a lot better than the official film posters. Come to that they
are probably frequently better than the films they're meant to
advertise. Take a look at http://tinyurl.com/54wkh8. Also
explore http://www.polishposter.com/. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
A particularly apt item in THE ONION: http://tinyurl.com/6m9ssy.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Is No Joke (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
For years the Republican Party has painted itself as the party of
small government. It wanted to let financial institutions regulate
and police themselves. This week we have seen where that has led.
Now they are admitting that some of these institutions might just
need a tad of a government handout and a little regulation to go
along with it. But just in case you think this a step back toward
big government they have wanted to cut the number of regulators way
down. I mean *way* down. They have proposed to cut the treasury
decision-making process to one person, Treasury Secretary Henry M.
Paulson, Jr. In their proposed Troubled Asset Relief Program they
suggest the following. (This is true!)
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act
are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not
be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
"The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary
deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this act -- without
regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts."
"Any funds expended for actions authorized by this Act, including
the payment of administrative expenses, shall be deemed
appropriated at the time of such expenditure."
How much money would Paulson have uncontrolled use of? It is
seven-tenths of a trillion dollars. Does Paulson seem like the
kind of person we should trust with seven-tenths of a trillion
dollars? Well, after being appointed by the President he has run
the treasury for the last two years and we can see what a spiffy
job he has done to this point.
In ancient Rome when a crisis seemed big enough the government
would just suspend itself and democracy and allow a dictator to run
the empire for the duration. Now a single dictator running
everything is a really small government. That may have been their
best remaining option at the time. And the really scary thing is
that this may be the best of our remaining options. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Sword and Sandal Films (film comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Whatever happened to old Steve Reeves movies?
Turner Classic Movies was running three "pepla" together. It gave
me a sort of nostalgic feel. This is a genre of film that seems
all but forgotten. I do not see books written about them. You do
not see revival houses playing the films. I am a little surprised
that Turner saw fit to show them. How many people today even know
much about the sub-genre of historical fantasy called "pepla," or
in the singular "peplum"? Taken literally, a peplum is a sort of
clothing worn in ancient Greece and Rome. It is draped over the
shoulder and then wrapped around the loins. In ancient Rome a
peplum was a robe of state. In Italy the films are also known as
"fusto" films. "Fusto" means muscleman. In this country we tended
to call these films by the English name "Sword and Sandal" films.
When applied to films it is a genre of film set in (usually)
classical historic times with a muscle-man hero.
Today there are just a few rare little revivals. But back when I
was a teenager there was a lot of pepla on Saturday night
television. I think the local station called their program
"Medallion Theatre." The pepla were a sort of film we associate
with 1960s Italy. Actually most were made in the years from 1958
to 1968, and they were made in the hundreds. But pepla actually go
back well into the silent era of filmmaking. CIBERIA (1914) was
probably the first true peplum film. It had a muscleman hero named
Maciste. Most of these films were not seen outside of Italy until
the late 1950s.
What really got the ball rolling was Joseph E. Levine finding the
film HERCULES in Italy. He dubbed it into English and released it
in the United States. It had cost him next to nothing and he made
a financial killing. It was not his first coup of that sort, by
the way. He had previously bought the American rights to show a
big-budget Japanese film called GOJIRA and which he re-cut and
released as GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. Hoping that lightning
would strike twice he tried to repeat the trick with Hercules. And
surely enough he made another killing at the box-office. HERCULES
and the shortly following HERCULES UNCHAINED were the first real
hits of this genre in this country. They played separately, I
believe, but when the appeal died down they played together on a
double feature. How anybody could stand to sit through two of
these films back to back is still a mystery to me. The films tend
to be these terribly uninvolving stories of not very high quality.
It does not help that they are so poorly dubbed into English. The
plots are mostly incoherent and usually just end up with the
muscleman hero being imprisoned by a tyrant and then the hero gets
angry and tears apart the kingdom. He does things like pulling
trees out of the ground by the roots and bopping the tyrant with
them. He then gets the girl, but he never seems to get very close
because these huge inflated biceps and pectorals seem to get in the
way.
When pepla proved profitable as an international product the
Italian film industry started grinding them out one after another.
We got a lot of the dubbed peplums over here. Only a few did I
ever see playing in theaters. Perhaps they played in drive-ins.
However, most went directly to television where stations could show
them on programs like my Medallion Theater. Many seemed to start
American body builders. Hercules was played variously by Steve
Reeves, Mark Forest, and Gordon Scott. Other heroes would be named
for famous strongmen of myth, history, and folklore like Samson,
Goliath, Colossus, and Atlas. Then there were some with a hero
known mostly only in Italy called Maciste, the fellow from CIBERIA.
Americans did not know Maciste, so frequently he got other names in
the translation. He might get a name like Colossus or the Son of
Samson. But if you saw the titles, he was really Maciste.
Initially only Joseph E. Levine could legally release a peplum
about a strongman named Hercules. But eventually it must have been
decided that he did not own the name and there were several
Hercules films among the pepla. For example, there was that
classic HERCULES AGAINST THE MOON MEN. I know what you are
thinking. That sounds to you like a silly idea for a film. The
truth was, no, it was not Hercules fighting actual men from the
moon. That would be ridiculous. It was Maciste fighting actual
men from the moon.
In waves the Italian film industry would pick a genre that they
thought would be popular and they would just make dozens of films
in that genre until the market was worn out. When there was no
more demand for muscleman films they moved on to other genres. I
seem to remember some spy films that were a sort of an imitation of
James Bond films. In 1977 and 1978 they re-geared and made a lot
of space opera films. They had been making them since the early
1960s, but STAR WARS gave them a real boost. However, what they
eventually made their big genre started in 1964 with A FISTFUL OF
DOLLARS. That film basically killed the pepla film and directors
like Sergio Leone and Mario Bava who had been making beefcake films
switched to making Westerns or horror films.
But somewhere out there are moldering a bunch of really bad but
fitfully fun films. I am hoping that Turner Classic Movies brings
more of them back. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Macs Redux (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
A few weeks ago I talked about our new Mac and its differences from
the PC. Almost all the ones I listed then were favorable towards
the Mac, but in fairness I now need to list some of the downsides.
(I will observe that while the positive aspects are mostly
immediately obvious, the negative ones seem to trickle in over
time.)
As a reference point, our PC had been running Windows XP; the Mac
is running Leopard.
1) As I did note, the Mac is more expensive. One friend says that
it is not expensive for what you get, so this can be interpreted as
Apple selling only high-end machines. If you are looking for a
cheap machine for travel or whatever, the Mac isn't it.
2) It is complicated to share files between the Mac and a DOS
machine. Our palmtops are DOS-based, and one has to remember to
save all text files destined for the palmtop as DOS-compatible, or
one loses all the line feeds. (Mac uses CR, DOS uses CR/LF.)
3) On the PC, one can selectively empty the Recycle bin. On the
Mac, emptying the Trash is an all-or-nothing thing. One might ask
*why* might want to selectively empty the Trash (our friend says if
you're not sure you want to delete a file, then don't delete it),
but nevertheless this is a capability that the PC provided that the
Mac doesn't.
[If you want to keep files around for a week after having removed
them, just in case, your might want to remove only the trashed
files that are more than a week old. Of course you can always go
back in time with the Time Machine automatic backup application.
-mrl]
Luckily, UNIX can come to the rescue--you can go into the Trash
directory and remove items "by hand."
4) On the PC one could plug in USB drives and then unplug them
without any fuss. On the Mac, plugging in a device mounts it; one
must explicitly unmount it before unplugging. I understand why
this is--one must tell the Mac to flush the write cache for the
device--but it was something that was done automatically on the PC.
5) And speaking of USB devices, the Mac has a bad habit of dumping
all sorts of cruft on flash cards, MP3 players, etc. Whenever a
USB memory device is plugged in, the Mac creates a "Spotlight"
database on it to make searching it easier, and a Trash directory
structure. Frankly, I don't want this stuff on my 128-megabyte MP3
player--there's little enough space as it is. I want it even less
on my friend's MP3 player if she wants to download a file from my
machine.
Once again, UNIX can come to the rescue--if you remember to go into
the drive and remove all this stuff. For drives you keep
inserting, you can tell the Mac not to "Spotlight" them and have to
live with only a small file on the drive, but there is no way to
tell it that the default on USB drives is no Spotlighting.
6) The Trash situation is particularly galling, because it means
that when you delete files on a flash card, it just moves them to a
.Trashes directory on that drive, so you don't free up any space,
until you empty *all* your Trash (when the flash card is plugged
in!), or until you go in with Unix to clean up the mess.
7) In addition to Spotlight files and Trash files, the Mac puts
other hidden files on the USB drive. When you copy a file called
xyz.csv to the drive, it also creates a hidden file called _xyz.csv
in the same directory. Among other things, this means that I can't
remove the directory later on the palmtop without using the MKS
Toolkit programs.
8) The Mac provides a backup program, Time Machine. It works
great--except when it runs into a problem during backup. Then it
gives you a pop-up window that says an error occurred, and a button
to click on that says "OK". There are no other choices. But
clicking on the button does not make it okay. You will get this
same error every hour--until you fix it. This entails going to the
backup directory, finding the "in-progress" file, and dragging it
into the Trash. This is, however, not documented anywhere; I
found it by Googling and finding a bulletin board where someone had
posted this.
9) As noted before, Office for the Mac 2008 cannot read Lotus 1-2-3
spreadsheets, which is all my palmtop recognizes. I can export
spreadsheets from the Mac to the palmtop by saving them as CSV
files, munging them with sed, and then importing them into Lotus.
Why do I have to munge them? Because Excel puts quotes around
alphanumeric fields only if they have embedded commas, while Lotus
expects any alphanumeric field to be in quotes. (Oh, and Excel
treats fields formatted as currency as alphanumeric rather than
numeric.) In any case, what are exported are values rather than
formulae, so the exported spreadsheets are good for reference only.
[Well, MS Office problems are with MS Office and not really the
Mac. There are no programmable macros. The Mac version of office
tools is much weaker. The interface seems less logical and harder
to use. -mrl]
10) There are programs that do not run on the Mac. The most
critical (for us) is the Garmin GPS database. There is supposedly
a conversion program to convert the database to a Mac, but it
requires a PC to run it on (which we don't really have), and I'm
still not clear on how to access the database on the Mac after
that. Luckily, before we left on vacation, I created several
datasets ready to copy to the GPS unit that collectively cover all
of North America, so it is not critical. I suspect at some point
we may buy/get a cheap laptop PC for travel, and that could handle
this.
11) This last may not be a Mac thing, as I had started to notice it
even on the PC. I save a web page for reading on my palmtop, only
to discover that the quotation marks, apostrophes, dashes, and such
show up as either "?"s or wacko character combinations (e.g., an o
with an umlaut, followed by a c with a cedilla, followed by an e
with an acute accent). The former is very annoying, since one
cannot do global replaces to fit it--*all* the "real" characters
map to the same thing: "?". The latter at least is amenable to
semi-automatic correction. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1924) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Capsule: One of the nearly forgotten films of the German (actually
in this case Austrian) Expressionist period is the Conrad Veidt
version of THE HANDS OF ORLAC. This is a seminal horror melodrama
about a pianist whose hands are destroyed in a train crash and are
replaced by hands taken from an executed murderer. The hands come
to have a life of their own. This film was remade as the until-
recently also rare MAD LOVE with Colin Clive as Orlac and with one
of Peter Lorre's juiciest roles. This original version runs a
little slowly by modern standards, but it has one of the great
performances by the under-appreciated Conrad Veidt. Rating: +2
(-4 to +4) or 7/10
Some of the very best horror films of all time came from Germany
between World War I and World War II. The German Expressionist
movement gave us films like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU,
THE GOLEM, WAXWORKS, METROPOLIS, and M. The films of German
Expressionist movement are characterized by distorted atmospheric
scenery was used to reflect the twists in the minds of the
characters in the story. The style was applied to other social
dramas like the so-called "Street Films," but some of the great
classic horror films were the mainstay of the movement. The
influence of German Expressionism can be felt in the Universal
horror films of the 1930s, many of which were made by German
Expressionist filmmakers who fled the politics of Europe.
One of the classics of Expressionism that has not until recently
been available in a watchable form is THE HANDS OF ORLAC starring
Conrad Veidt. Most of us know Veidt mostly as playing villains,
especially Nazis like Major Strasser in CASABLANCA. Veidt was
actually a great horror actor. He was Germany's equivalent of Lon
Chaney, Sr. He was not Jewish, but his wife was, so they fled the
Nazis and came to the United States. But Veidt never had the
career in the United States that he deserved. One of his best
films after coming to the US was THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, in which his
face is carved into a permanent grin. He had to convey emotions
with his eyes, while the view of his whole face denied them. But
getting back to THE HANDS OF ORLAC, this one of his great horror
roles from his period of making films in Europe. This was the
first film to use the idea that body parts might take on a life of
their own, an idea used several times since. The film was remade
as MAD LOVE with Peter Lorre. The story was again remade in 1960
under the titles THE HANDS OR ORLAC and THE HANDS OF A STRANGLER.
But its influence can be felt in many films like THE BEAST WITH
FIVE FINGERS.
Veidt plays a concert pianist who is in a train collision. He
loses his hands, but while is unconscious a notorious murderer is
guillotined and Orlac's doctors transplant the hands from the
corpse onto Orlac's wrists. Orlac awakes with the hands of a
killer at the end of his arms. What is more, the hands seem to
have a life of their own. Orlac is fixated on these hands. The
Conrad Veidt version goes a little slowly as Orlac's obsession with
the hands consumes the man. There are long sequences of Veidt just
staring in horror at the hands on his wrist. The films picks up a
little as he becomes fascinated with a strange knife, supposedly
that of the killer who provided his hands. But the knife is now
the murder weapon in new crimes where the fingerprints left behind
are those of the guillotined killer. Veidt plays the role so that
the hands seem to be the biggest thing in the frame. They seem to
dominate his entire body and the hands distort the entire posture
of the body. The hands seem twisted almost to suggest tarantulas.
THE HANDS OF ORLAC was based on the book LES MAINS D'ORLAC by
Maurice Renard. Robert Wiene four years earlier directed THE
CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), really the first film of the German
Expressionist Movement. That film was written Carl Mayer among
others and its star was Conrad Veidt. THE HANDS OF ORLAC reunites
the director, actor, and writer of that film.
The story is bizarre enough for modern audiences, but the pacing is
a little slow. While it is Expressionist, it uses very different
visual approaches than did THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. In the
earlier film much of the psychological distortion is in the
geometry of the sets. Doors were strange irregular geometric
figures. Buildings leaned. There were no right angles in any of
the sets. In THE HANDS OF ORLAC the buildings would fit into the
real world, but they are overpoweringly big at times. Orlac's
father lives in an imposing castle with high doorway arches.
Hospital scenes also seem to be in rooms of infinite dimension.
Much of the mood comes from atmospheric lighting.
The Criterion Collection contains an interesting account of how
there are two different negatives. One made for domestic release
and one for international. Some scenes were shot at the same time
of the same performance but at a slightly different angle because
the negatives came from two different cameras set side-by-side for
the filming; other times they used two different takes. In some
cases they were edited differently so some scenes are actually
quite different in the domestic and international versions. In any
case, this is one of the great pivotal films of early history of
the horror film and it has been too hard to find for too long. I
rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10, though comparing it to
modern horror films is very much an apples-to oranges sort of
comparison.
Film credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015202/
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: IRRELIGION: A MATHEMATICIAN EXPLAINS WHY THE ARGUMENTS FOR
GOD JUST DON'T ADD UP by John Allen Paulos (ISBN 978-0-809-05919-5)
(book review by Mark R. Leeper)
This is the sort of book that was needed eventually, even though
what it does is not all that difficult. John Allen Paulos is one
of the county's leading essayists on the topic Mathematics and
Society. Like David Krumholtz's character Charlie Eppes in
television's "Numb3rs" he finds a surprising array of applications
of math in everyday life. He will look at mathematical issues
raised by political advertisements or the stock market or the
effects on society of "innumeracy." The latter is a word of his
own coinage, I believe, and is the numerical equivalent and
parallel to illiteracy.
In IRRELIGION he looks at the pseudo-logical arguments believers
give for the existence of God and shows the flaws in each argument.
This is immediately certain to make him persona non grata in a
certain sector of the religious camp. Many of these are people who
consider a flawed and misleading piece of logic that still might
convince someone at some level that they are right about God as
being far better than an absolutely correct proof about prime
numbers. By explaining the flaws he is really doing a favor for
those who have accepted the arguments and/or those who use the
proofs to convince others. Experience suggests, however, that the
favor will not be one that is appreciated.
It should be noted the Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple
University, is not here arguing in any way against the existence of
God, though he does declare (I almost said "admit") that he is an
atheist. His purpose is to show that some logical arguments, even
some that some people have an emotional attachment to, are flawed
and do not stand up to scrutiny. In IRRELIGION he examines twelve
popular (if that is the right word) arguments used as supposed
proofs to convince the credulous that there are correct and logical
proofs for the existence. This is a short book, about 150 pages,
and the purported proofs he examines are mostly familiar.
I admit that this whole subject has been a personal interest of
mine since in High School English we read Thomas Aquinas's supposed
proofs of the existence of God and claims he made that were vaguely
mathematical were dead wrong. (For example he said that if
something is infinite there could be no room for anything else. I
knew that a line split a plane into two half planes, each of which
was infinite. He said that a chain of causes could not go back
infinitely but it is quite possible just as every integer on a
number line is one greater than the integer to its left and there
is no leftmost.) I do not blame Aquinas for not knowing the
mathematics, but even today his arguments are still used to
convince the credulous of the existence of God.
My rebuttals are not necessarily the same as those of Paulos, but
they frequently amount to being much the same. There are
limitations on what Paulos can hope to do. Showing that twelve of
the most popular arguments are false lines of reasoning does not
show that there does not exist someplace a logical proof. Further,
even if he could show that there can be no logical proof it would
still not prove the non-existence of God. The Universe just may
not give us the tools to decide the question.
Paulos says what needs to be said. This book is certainly less
pointed than is the recent THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins or
GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING by Christopher
Hitchens. This book will not endear Paulos to the religious
community. They certainly will not abandon their positions because
they do not hold those positions for logical reasons in the first
place. But I suspect that it will not get the rebuttals that those
books got either. To correct his logic, a critic would have to be
better at logic than is Paulos. That does not seem likely. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE BEAT GENERATION (letters of comment by Peter Rubinstein
and Taras Wolansky)
In response to Mark's review of THE BEAT GENERATION in the 09/19/08
issue of the MT VOID, Pete Rubinstein writes, "Slapsie Maxie
Rosenbloom was a professional boxer, not a wrestler. He was
actually the Light Heavyweight world champion for a while. (So he
was even more miscast as a wrestling beatnik than you thought.)"
[-pir]
And Taras Wolansky notes, "It seems you left out reviewed movies'
release dates this time. For example, it would be useful to know
that the camp classic, The Beat Generation, was made in 1959. And
not only because there was another movie with the same title in
1987. It is, indeed, embarrassing to see once-proud MGM trying to
compete in the exploitation market with Samuel Z. Arkoff's American
International Pictures. [-tw]
Mark responds, "You are right about the missing date in the BEAT
GENERATION review. It was my editing error. The year made it into
the Internet posting, but I did not catch it in time to get it into
the VOID version. I too found it strange that MGM was making a
film so like an American International film, but I suppose they
needed to fill the bottom half of double bills." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Blatant Prejudice (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
In response to Mark's question, "Why is it always Christmas" and
not a Jewish holiday in World War II movies like A BRIDGE TOO FAR
(1977), Taras Wolansky writes, "According to 1942 War Office
statistics, the British Army was 98.5% Christian and 1.1% Jewish.
See GOD AND THE BRITISH SOLDIER by Michael Snape (Routledge, 2005)
in books.google.com." [-tw]
Mark replies, "I cannot verify your figures for the British army,
but they sound about right. And far fewer of them get much
advancement. I guess that is a holdover in one way or the other
from earlier times. The Jews wanted to set up Jewish Brigades, but
Chamberlain would not allow it. Churchill was less resistant and
toward the end of the war the percentages went up. There are a lot
more Jews in the American military. My brother-in-law is a colonel
in the Army Reserve. My uncle fought in Europe in WWII." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In THE VALLEY-WESTSIDE WAR by Harry Turtledove (ISBN-13
978-0-765-31487-1, ISBN-10 0-765-31487-8), Turtledove is definitely
falling into bad habits. A family with a teenage daughter is sent
to a parallel world which seems safe at first. Then war breaks out
and they are threatened. But their return to their home world in
the middle is too easy and the return to the now-dangerous Valley-
Westside world *with the daughter* makes no sense. But even more
annoying: how many times does Turtledove need to say that they add
brandy to the water to avoid the runs, or that they have to kill
and prepare their own chickens? I swear he does each at least
three times. This seems left over from those multi-volume books,
where he repeated all the background in each book, but here it's
one short book. And there is no real resolution at the end. I
don't *think* he's going to write a sequel, but it sure looks like
it's set up to allow it.
PLAYBACK by Raymond Chandler (ISBN-13 978-0-394-75766-7, ISBN-10
0-394-75766-1) is the seventh and last Philip Marlowe novel.
Written in 1958, well after the other six (THE BIG SLEEP, FAREWELL
MY LOVELY, THE HIGH WINDOW, THE LADY OF THE LAKE, THE LITTLE
SISTER, and THE LONG GOODBYE--and, yes, he wrote them all in
alphabetical order!), it is, alas, a pale shadow of Chandler's
peak. It is remarkable to realize that Chandler's reputation is
based on such a small number of novels, but then Jane Austen only
wrote six novels and Oscar Wilde's reputation as a dramatist is
based on nine plays, of which only five have achieved classic
status.
Anyone who has seen the movie CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF with Elizabeth
Taylor and Paul Newman should read the original play by Tennessee
Williams (ISBN-13 978-0-811-21601-2, ISBN-10 0-811-21601-2) to get
some idea of how restricted filmmakers were in 1958. Among other
things, one could see the entire movie without understanding why
Scooter committed suicide. On the other hand, we recently watched
AIRPLANE!, a movie that got a PG rating in 1980, and would probably
get an R rating now! [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The most terrifying words in the English
language are, "I'm from the government and
I'm here to help you."
-- attributed to Ronald Reagan