1941: The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin

The Author:

           Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896-1981) was born in Dunbartonshire, Scotland.  His father died when he was seven, and he and his mother lived with his maternal grandparents before eventually moving to Glasgow.  At the University of Glasgow, Cronin became a medical doctor, serving as a medical officer in the first world war and later as a general practitioner in small towns in Scotland and a mining town in Wales, before being appointed Medical Inspector of Mines.  At the university, he also met Agnes Mary Gibson, whom he married in 1921.  They had three children together and they were married for nearly sixty years.

            He was laid up with an ulcer in 1930, requiring six months recuperation, during which time he wrote his first novel, Hatter’s Castle, which was an immediate success.  He wrote several books before, in 1937, publishing The Citadel.  The Citadel is to the British National Health System (NHS) what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is to the US’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Not only a huge critical and commercial success, The Citadel established Cronin’s as an important literary figure of his time.

            In 1939, Cronin and his family moved to the US, settling in places as disparate as Bel Air, California and Blue Hill, Maine.  He remained a prolific writer for the rest of his life, and spent the last years of his life living in Switzerland.  He passed away in Montreux in 1981.

The Book: 

          The Keys of the Kingdom tells the life story of Francis Chisholm, a Scottish Catholic priest, from his childhood to his old age, focusing largely on his thirty five years spent in establishing a mission in Pai-Tan, China. Chisholm is an extremely sympathetic character, and, like most of the supporting characters, is written with a good amount of depth.  The characters are the greatest part of this novel.

         From the beginning, we know that Chisholm is not your dogmatic, stiff, hellfire-and-damnation cleric.  The first chapter takes place when Chisholm has a vocation in Scotland in his old age, and is being investigated by the local bishop (the rest of the novel is chronological, starting from his childhood).  He had complaints against him for saying things like, "Atheists may not all go to hell. I knew one who didn't," and "Christ was a perfect man, but Confucius had a better sense of humor."¹  This is a trend I've been finding in a lot of the books on this list: pro-religion via being anti-dogma.  That is to say, many of these books argue that reliance on dogma is not only bad, but directly detrimental to religion, arguing instead a form of what is essentially Humanism based on Christianity.  The first book I reviewed, The Inside of the Cup, dealt with a priest discovering this.  This trend continued.  There were the good preachers in Elmer Gantry, Dean Harcourt in Green Light, and Casey in The Grapes of Wrath.  Whereas a novel like Elmer Gantry tried to combat what Lewis saw as hypocrisy by exposing a negative figure, the others I've listed focus mainly on presenting a good preacher, an example of what religious officials should be. (I don't think it's a coincidence that the good preachers in the novels listed above rarely achieve any high status, as opposed to the Gantry-like characters.)

     Chisholm's life is one long attempt to make the world a better place, which he does, to the extent that he is able.  Other characters, often within the clergy, stand in his way, but this opposition is not generally due to malice or greed, but rather people who are more concerned with the number of baptisms at the missions than with the number of people who benefit from the mission.  The amount of philosophical and theological monologues alone suggests that Cronin is using Chisholm to state his own religious views, which seem to be humanistic.  Chisholm argues that the church should argue pacifism in times of war.  He argues that good works, regardless of religion, are paths to salvation.  Basically, he argues for human decency and kindness.

      Like pretty much every book I've read here so far, this one was adapted to film:

      The 1944 film starred Gregory Peck (who also played Pa Baxter in the film adaptation of The Yearling).  It seems, though, that Cronin is better known outside the U.S. Most of the search traffic for his name comes from India and the U.K.,² which is probably in no small part due to the importance of The Citadel in the U.K.

     I wouldn't try to stop anyone from reading The Keys to the Kingdom, and it is certainly an enjoyable book.  I don't feel that it's one that you need to go out of your way to read, though.

Also published 1941:
James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce   
C. S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters 
H. A. Rey and Margret Rey - Curious George 
Bertolt Brecht - Mother Courage and Her Children

1. Cronin, A. J. The Keys of the Kingdom. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1941. Print.
2. Google Trends page

     

Films Written by Famous Novelists

The relationship between cinema and literature is a complex give and take.  One thing I've learned from my project is that the two forms of media are inextricably linked.  So it comes as no surprise that novelists will sometimes write film scripts.  What does come as a surprise are the specific examples I've dug up.


#1 The Big Sleep                                                          

The Big Sleep is one of the most famous film noir movies ever made.  Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the 1946 film is based on the 1939 novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler.  Set in Los Angeles, California, The Big Sleep (the book and movie) is largely responsible for defining the the hard-boiled crime novel.  So, who did the studios get to write it?  Chandler?  Dashiell Hammett? James Cain?

                                                   ...Written by William Faulkner

William Faulkner, known and acclaimed for his novels about the post-Civil War South.  While the subject matter may seem a surprising departure from Faulkner's usual area of interest, the complex (perhaps even convoluted) manner of storytelling is right up Faulkner's alley


#2 Pride and Prejudice                                               

The 1940 version of Jane Austen's 1813 novel of the same name, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier is considered a masterpiece.  At the same time a love story and a criticism of the society she lived in, Austen's novel could draw any number of screenwriters.

                                                  ...Written by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley, best known for Brave New World, seems an unlikely, if appropriate, choice for screenwriter.  The exaggeration stylistically inherent in romantic era literature leads people to forget that, like Huxley, Austen was a satirist.  And while people think of Huxley in terms of futurism, other novels of his (like Crome Yellow), are contemporary critiques on British society.  Huxley also wrote the screenplay for the 1943 version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine.

#3 Moby Dick                                              

There have only been a couple film versions of Melville's 1851 novel.  In fact, putting aside the Made-for-TV movies, only three film version have been theatrically released: the 1926 silent film, The Sea Beast, a 1930 version that is only very loosely connected to the novel, and the 1956 version starring Gregory Peck as Ahab.  Who would you get to write something like this?  Hemingway, maybe?  

                                                       ...Written by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, best known as a science fiction/fantasy writer, and author of works including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, is not what anyone would expect for a project like this.  But hey, you can't argue with results.


#4 Sex and the Single Girl                                 

In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published the non-fiction advice book, Sex and the Single Girl, advocating sexual freedom for women.  The 1964 film is a farce centering around Dr. Helen Gurley Brown (the fictional version having apparently earned a PhD.) played by Natalie Wood, also starring Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall.  So, a raunchy sex comedy (by 1960's standards).  Maybe Jacqueline Susann?  Sidney Sheldon won an Oscar for this kind of thing (1947's The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer).

                                                         ...Written by Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller!?  The man is famous for his gallows humor!  He wrote Catch-22, one of the finest novels of his generation.  That said, he didn't seem to get the same critical respect for the films he worked on.  Sex and the Single Girl was a financially successful critical failure.  As was 1967's Peter Seller's spy spoof, Casino Royale (for which Heller remained uncredited).  His only other screenplay, 1970's Dirty Dingus Magee, seems to have not really gained any traction.


#5 You Only Live Twice                              

Ninjas! Space Kidnappings! Evil Cat-Guy!  It's got the crazy over the top action of a Roger Moore Bond Movie, but the suavity of Sean Connery!  While a pretty serious departure from Ian Fleming's novel, it must have been written by some action/espionage writer, right?

                                                                  ...Written by Roald Dahl

The man who brought the world Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and James and the Giant Peach, also brought us an awesome spy/action/adventure movie.  This isn't only time Dahl adapted one of Fleming's novels.  Ian Fleming wrote a novel titled Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car.  Roald Dahl added the Child Catcher, a villain who kidnaps the protagonists.  Just to reiterate, Ian Fleming wrote a novel about a magical flying car, and Roald Dahl added a diabolical villain.  Something seems backwards here.


#6 Superman and Superman 2                 

The two best Superman movies. Ah, Superman.  A character so morally unambiguous that a gritty reboot just can't cut it.  These two films have action, adventure, romance, and are a lot of fun.

                                                                 ...Written by Mario Puzo

Really? That Mario Puzo?  Someone, at some point actually said, "Hey, you know who would be great to right this light-hearted superhero movie?  The guy who wrote The Godfather."  I'm not arguing with the results, I'm just a bit surprised at how random this seems.

Public TV Interview with Ray Bradbury

1940: How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

The Author:

            Richard Daffyd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (1906-1983) was born in London, England to Welsh parents, a fact only discovered after his death.  Throughout his life, he claimed that he had been born in Pembrokeshire, Wales.  He was, for much of his life, considered one of the preeminent literary figures of Welsh culture.

            At the age of sixteen, he “was sent to Italy to learn hotel management” and “studied painting and sculpture in [his] spare time.”  While there, he worked with Italian filmmakers and was first introduced to the cinema.  After spending several years in the army, he got a job playing film extras, and was first introduced to professional writing as “a reporter on a penny film paper.”  In 1938, his first play (Poison Pen) was produced.  In 1939, he published his first novel, How Green Was My Valley, which became an international bestseller (and the subject of this post). 

            Llewellyn served with the Welsh Guards in World War Two.  He proceeded to have a long career in the arts, writing many novels, as well as several plays and screenplays.  He passed away in 1983. 

The Book: 

1st edition cover

         How Green Was My Valley tells the life story of Huw Morgan as he prepares to leave the Welsh valley where he'd lived much of his life.  Coming from a family of coal miners, Huw's family deals with the ramifications of a changing economy and way of life, as disaster, politics, and relationships slowly dismantle the Morgan family.

       As sad as that last paragraph sounded, the story is generally nostalgic, as Huw pines for a lost time when the world was simpler, or as the case may be, when the Welsh coal miners could go about their life without interference from the outside world.  The story is told through the lens of Huw's nostalgia, which gives it a tone of sadness and warmth throughout.

      There are certain peculiarities in style due to the Welsh background of the story.  There is a list of name pronunciations on the last page of the edition I used, explaining names like Meirddyn (Mire-rr-thin) and Cynlais (Kunn-lice).  Likewise, there are certain turns-of-phrase that I haven't seen elsewhere, e.g., "There is good were those nights..."  ("There is [adjective] is/were the [noun]" appears frequently throughout the novel.)

      Even with the foreign setting, How Green Was My Valley was an immediate success in the U.S.  Like The Grapes of Wrath, The Yearling, Gone with the Wind, and The Good Earth, How Green Was My Valley focuses on an idyllic vision of rural life, a vision that was shattered by the changing industry in America. But like Gone with the Wind, the 1941 movie (directed by Grapes of Wrath director John Ford), is largely responsible for most of the notoriety the books still maintains.

     How Green Was My Valley is an emotionally compelling story, and while it does deal with important social and political issues, those issues are less to the forefront than they are in Grapes of Wrath.  (e.g., unionization is important to the story primarily in how it causes a schism between members of the Morgan family).  It's a good read, but if you don't like heavy nostalgia, you might be better off with something else.

Also published in 1940:

Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls
Carson McCullers - The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Richard Wright - Native Son

Sources:
Kunitz, Stanley. Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. 1942. Print.

Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley. New York: Macmillan Company. 1940. Print.

BBC Website

  

Back to the Future Theory

What!?  Two movie posts in one week!  Yes, well, so be it.  This is a fan theory of mine that not only explains things like what the flux capacitor does, but answers some continuity 'problems' in the films and introduces (and solves) a couple more.  It is inexcusably complicated.  

Note: 1. Whenever someone travels backwards through time, they create a new timeline.  Timelines will be named in the order they are created (e.g., when Marty first travels through time and arrives in 1955, he creates Timeline B.  Everyone indigenous to that timeline will be surnamed B, e.g., Doc B.)    2. Each timeline will be identical to the one that preceded it, with the exception of events altered as a result of the time travelers whose arrival created the new timeline.  

Part 1:

It’s been pointed out many times before that the Marty that gets sent back at the end of BttF Part 1 is not the same Marty we know and love.  This Marty was born in Timeline B, had cool parents, etc.  The popular fan theory about this is that Doc Brown made Marty B disappear.  The implications are more complex than that.  If Marty B did not go back to 1955, then why don’t we have the same paradox that we’d have had if Marty had never been born?  This led me to understand the flux capacitor.  When Marty A goes back in time and creates Timeline B, the flux capacitor stops working.  When Marty prevents his parents from meeting, he starts to disappear.  This is because Timeline A and Timeline B are still causally connected.  The flux capacitor allows multiple Timelines to exist, without being causally connected, therefore preventing paradoxes.  Part 1 is the easiest to deal with.  Marty skips to the future of Timeline B.  Then Doc B tells him to get in the Delorean, right now!  

Part 2:       

In 2015, Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer sees future Marty.  This is impossible.  Marty A disappeared in 1985 and skipped straight to 2015.  So who has been living Marty A’s life for the last 30 years?  Marty B.  Doc B isn’t cold-hearted enough to make the guy disappear forever, he just sent him a bit ahead, which is why he needed to get Marty out of the way as soon as possible (NOTE: In regards to the Rolls Royce accident that we see at the end of Part 3 and is mentioned in this sequence, it’s plausible that the accident would have occurred to Marty B, considering the chronology of the final scenes in Part 3.  This poses no problem to the theory.)    While there, Biff B steals the Delorean and travels back to 1985, creating Timeline C.  One of the big questions people have is “Why didn’t Biff travel to the future of the timeline he just created, i.e. Timeline C?”  Not only is the flux capacitor is keeping the timelines separate, 2015 B can’t collapse the same way 1985 A did because there are non-indigenous entities in 2015 B, namely, Marty A.  So, Old Biff B gets back to 2015 B, and Marty A and Doc B go to 1985, only to discover that it’s 1985 C, (their arrival changing it to Timeline D).  Marty A and Doc B go back to 1955 (creating Timeline E).  In 1955 E, we see another instance of Marty A and the events from Part 1 play out as they already had (justifying point 2 of my intro notes).  So, all seems well, then Doc B gets sent back to 1885 (creating Timeline F).  Marty A then gets a letter from Doc B, saying he’s in 1885.  Marty then finds indigenous Doc Brown (i.e., Doc E).  You may ask, how did Doc B send a letter from Timeline F to timeline E?  The flux capacitor is no longer working! Timeline E and F are still causally linked!

Part 3:   

Doc E helps Marty A go back in time, creating Timeline G.  Wild West stuff happens.  The photos change because Timelines F and G are still causally linked.  The good guys win and Marty goes to 1985 G.  He goes to pick up his girlfriend (leaving the indigenous Marty w/o a car and no idea where his girlfriend is) and almost gets into an accident with a Rolls Royce. She takes the fax from 2015 B out of her pocket and sees it disappear.  This is significant.  Marty A and Doc B left Jennifer B (and the letter) on her porch in Timeline D.  How’d she get here?  My conclusion is that, without the flux capacitor, entities existing outside their native timeline will phase into new timelines, so long as the new timeline does not preclude the person from existing. Since there is no longer a flux capacitor, the letter is causally connected to Timeline F (i.e. the one after Marty retrieved the Sports Almanac and events could be assumed to be otherwise similar to Timeline B). Then time traveling trains, roll credits, and, assumably, Marty A and his doppleganger.

Film Review: Dogtooth (2009)

This is a bit of a special post.  As the banner above (oh so subtly) indicates, this is part of movie-review blog Cinematic Katzenjammer's Not-So-Secret Review Swap.  Whereby a number of bloggers pick a title they want others to review, and are themselves assigned one.  So, without further ado, this is Dogtooth.

   Dogtooth focuses on a family living in a gated compound.  The parents have convinced their young adult children that the world outside the compound is extremely dangerous, and can only be entered safely if you are in a car.  As such, only the father ever leaves the compound, keeping his son and two daughters completely ignorant of the outside world, with the exception of paying Christina, a young woman who works as a security guard at the same factory as the father, to have sex with his son. She brings little bits of the outside world in with her, and this spurs on the plot. 

      

   The entire story is permeated by a sense of surrealism.  The house and garden seem almost overexposed, making it seem bright and bleak at the same time, almost sterile. Hermetic, even.

The cinematography is excellent at creating this feeling, making you feel like a voyeur, an intruder from the world outside the gate.  You are put in a world where the rules are different, where words have different meanings and the only reality is what you can see with your own eyes.  Perhaps what's so deeply unsettling about this story is that it makes us realize how much of what we think we know about the world, how much we are absolutely, undoubtedly, completely and utterly certain of, we haven't proven for ourselves, is, in fact, just something we've been told, just as the children in Dogtooth have no reason not to believe that fish just appear in their swimming pool. How many things we take for granted are, in fact, given?  With the exception of Christina, none of the characters in the movie have names; they are just Father, Mother, Eldest Daughter, Son, and Youngest Daughter.  They live in a world that is like a claustrophobic version of Wonderland.  If the emotion is predominately one of surrealism, the story and characters inhabit a world of hysterical realism, one that behaves by its own rigid logic, but a logic that is largely inaccessible to you or me.  But the characters accept that airplanes are only several inches long as readily as you or I would accept that the moon is huge.  

Perhaps the greatest force for the discomfiting unreality is how the characters straddle the line between children, adults, and automata.   This mix of childlike credulity and dependence, an occasionally adult willfulness (not to mention the sex, which I'll talk about later), and an almost military obedience to the father, is unsettling.  Add to that an almost guileless sincerity to their emotions, and the frequent lack thereof. The acting requires treading a very thin line, being strange and dissociated enough to seem alien, while being vulnerable enough to relate to, and the actors walk this tightrope with great skill.  

If you watched the trailer, you may have noticed a quick shot of the Younger Sister licking the Eldest Sister's shoulder.  Incest plays a large role in the story, thematically and literally and occurs with the same ingenuousness and apathy as the rest of the performance.  This goes back to the question of knowledge. The characters' entire understanding of the world comes from what their parents tell them and their own (extremely regulated) experience.  Besides being much more explicit than you'd find in an American film (Dogtooth is unrated in the US, but I'd expect it would get an NC-17), the sex scenes in Dogtooth carry forward the disturbing nature of the story to its climax (pun regretfully intended):  It not only breaks the most deeply ingrained taboo we have, but the act itself is done with an almost stoic reserve by both involved.  It's not portrayed as a result of passion, or lust, or love, or pleasure, etc. etc.  Like most everything in this movie, it takes something we understand (or think we understand) on a very fundamental level, and presents it to us in a strange way, leading to a feeling of alienation that is increased by the voyeuristic cinematography.    

       

In 2011, Dogtooth was nominated for the best foreign language film Oscar (losing to Denmark's In a Better World).  It won prizes at many film festivals, including Cannes.  This is significant, because Greek cinema has had little international appeal for decades.  While many people (i.e. me and many people I know) find the Academy Awards to be (just a smidge) self-indulgent, the importance of the nomination to the Greek film industry is significant.  In fact, no Greek film had been nominated for an Academy Award since 1977's Iphigenia and has never won the award.  

Succinctly, Dogtooth is an impressive film.  The reason I don't say it's "a good movie" is because I don't feel that the terms "good" or "bad" can accurately convey how I feel about a movie that is so different from what we usually see.  The acting was excellent, the story was compelling.  The cinematography and set design were remarkably effective at creating a surreal and unsettling tone.  In those regards, this is a good film.  (I would have liked to see a little more about how this way of life affected the father and mother, but that's a minor point.)   But those are really means to an end.  The end, in this case, is to challenge your understanding of the world, both emotionally and intellectually.  It's an understandably uncomfortable process.  It succeeds in that goal, but whether or not that is good or bad somehow seems to be an invalid question.   I'd recommend the film, with the caveat that some people may find it upsetting.  Not just because of the subject matter of the explicit sex scenes (if you can't handle that, there's no way you'd benefit from watching this film), but because it does so in a way that causes a very uncomfortable emotional contradiction, creates a sense of alienation from and intimate connection to the characters.  It pulls you halfway into a world where the morality is largely incompatible with our own.  It's an experience that can either be beneficial if honestly acknowledged and considered, or just incredibly unpleasant. 

 (Because I fell obligated to include a lit reference, you should really read David Foster Wallace's essay David Lynch Keeps His Head from the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which deals with much of what I discussed in the last paragraph, only w/r/t David Lynch films.)

1982 Round Table Discussion with Isaac Asimov, Gene Wolfe, and Harlan Ellison

A half-hour syndicated talk program, covering the nature and marketing of science-fiction (or speculative-fiction) works.   The hosts are named Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin (which are not, in fact, porn pseudonyms).

A bit of interesting background to the interview can be found in the archives of Harlan Ellison's website. (Check the post for November 1, 2008 11:13:15)