Philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote of marriage as the lowest state to which a Christian can descend, but Jean-Louis, the Jesuitical bachelor protagonist of this fourth installment of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, strongly objects. “Pascal’s Wager,” he says, is a calculated utilitarian exchange, inapplicable to the Read More …
While visiting Naples to close the estate of a deceased relative, two middle-aged sophisticates (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) are forced to acknowledge the tenuous condition of their marriage. Katherine and Alex spend much of the film apart, wandering through the rubble-strewn, post-war landscape, which Read More …
A romantic triangle is one of the most common storylines in film. The characters are usually pretty well defined: a well meaning guy with a raging libido, a gorgeous woman with loose morals, and a sweet sensible girl pining for a husband. And of course, Read More …
For many years I had taped to my office door a copy of Syd Harris’s famous cartoon in which two academics perused a chalkboard with a sea of figures making a complex mathematical formula. Embedded in the middle was the notation “Then a Miracle Occurs.” Modernists don’t Read More …
Bark Cooper, one of the two elderly protagonists of Leo McCarey’s MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937), boasts of one and only one accomplishment in his life. When he was a young man, Bark won the heart of his wife Lucy over a rival who became Read More …