I'm back at home, where over the past two nights I've watched a couple of good movies. Last night I found a razor sharp print of "Tobacco Road"(1941) on Youtube. I've been wanting to see this movie for several years now, ever since I caught a few minutes of it on TCM a while back at Pearl's. It was originally a stage play, based on the novel by Erskine Caldwell, that in the 1930s held the record for the longest running show on Broadway. It's the story of The Lesters, a family of poor Georgia sharecroppers. Apparently some of the material in the book was too controversial to be used (and I have no idea what it is), so the play was homogenised, and then when John Ford was chosen to direct the movie version, he decided to turn it into a comedy with tragic undertones. The plot is simple : "Jeeter Lester" (Charlie Grapewin), the family patriarch, is informed that he will lose his ramshackle house and farmland if he can't come up with rent by a certain date. Jeeter's never had to pay rent before, he was always under the wing of a kindhearted landowner. But the Great Depression has begun, and the bank is taking back the land. Will Jeeter be able to come up with the money?
The actual storyline contains subthemes and dialogue which is more complex than that, and involves religion, social commentary on rural America and materialism in general. But it's played mostly for laughs, and the characters are deliberately exaggerated to be caricatures of the Deep South, like those in "Lil' Abner". Still, it's so well played, by Charlie Grapewin especially (he was born in 1869!), and most importantly it's a John Ford picture, which means that it looks fantastic and is filled with sentiment. I've been meaning for a long time to undertake an exploration of Ford's work (and it's too bad we never got to do one with Professor Tim). I've seen most of Ford's most famous movies, and you have too, but he made a lot more that we've never seen, like "Tobacco Road" which I highly recommend. There is a John Ford box set called "Ford at Fox" that I've got my eye on. The price is steep, but if it goes down, perhaps at Christmastime, or if I can find an affordable used copy, then we will do us a proper John Ford retrospective. ////
Then tonight I watched a noir called "The Great Flamarion"(1945), starring Erich von Stroheim, about a Trick Shooter, a marksman, who has a nightclub act and falls in love with his assistant "Connie" (Mary Beth Hughes). The thing is, she's married and her husband (Dan Duryea) is also part of the act. He keeps showing up drunk, which puts him in danger because von Stroheim uses real bullets in the act, which requires precise timing from the performers. The reason Duryea drinks is that he's jealous of his wife, who is always putting the make on other men. Now she's trying to seduce her boss, the grim and unflappable von Stroheim, he of The Never Changing Expression. Von Stroheim eventually succumbs to her charms, but what he doesn't realise is that she's just using him to get rid of Dan Duryea her husband. She's got a third man waiting in the wings, with whom she plans to run off when all is said and done.
However, she may not have seen enough Erich von Stroheim movies to know that she has messed with the wrong guy. I also found "The Great Flamarion" on Youtube, this time from a recommendation, and the picture quality was once again pristine. The director was Anthony Mann, who later became known, like John Ford, for his masterful Westerns, featuring wide open landscapes and realistic characterizations. Ford had John Wayne, Mann had James Stewart, with whom he made several absolute classics, like "Winchester '73", "The Far Country" and "The Man From Laramie", all of which I have on dvd.
Last but not least, I finally began a new book, "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins, the author of "Gobekli Tepe", which I read at the beginning of this year. I blogged about that book, and if you recall, Gobekli Tepe is the name of the world's oldest stone temple, unearthed during the past thirty years at a site in Turkey. It was Collins' book that brought Gobekli Tepe to the public eye; before he wrote about it, it was known mostly to archaeologists and paleoanthropologists. In short, the temple - which consists of several circular sites situated on a constructed mound (see "mound culture") - was built at the direction of an advanced technical culture that settled among the hunter-gatherers of Anatolia (now Turkey). Both of these cultures had somehow managed to survive the cataclysmic Younger Dryas Impact Event, in which comet fragments struck the Earth and exploded in the sky circa 9800 BC.
The more primitive hunter gatherers were terrified and superstitious for centuries thereafter. They suffered from what one historian refers to as "catastrophobia". Imagine seeing a freakin' comet headed toward Earth.
And then try to imagine the geophysical effects when it broke apart, and it's very large fragments, the size of football fields, either exploded in airbursts like nuclear weapons, or hit the ground full force. It was very close to being the end of human civilization, at least for the peoples of the northern hemisphere.
At any rate, a more advanced culture, with sophisticated tool making skills and organisational capabilities, ended up in Anatolia after migrating from Russia and Scandinavia, where a new mini-Ice Age had set in after the comet impact. Finding the locals in a state of ongoing terror, they directed the building of the mound that became Gobekli Tepe, that ultimately included tall stone monuments in honor of the Godlike "people of knowledge", who promised to protect the locals from further astral catastrophies.
These advanced people are known as The Swiderians, and at this point, to avoid having to write a full length review of the book and it's history, I suggest you Google "Gobekli Tepe" and "Andrew Collins" if you are interested in the subject. I'll add that you shouldn't waste your time searching for conventional information about Gobekli Tepe, because all you will get is the same old and tired info about what hunter-gathers have always been assumed to be (i.e, simpletons), and how the Younger Dryas could not possibly have been caused by a comet.
Snoozeville.
The trouble with many of the sciences, and especially the geophysical ones, or anthropology, is that the science itself is only a couple of hundred years old. We haven't been studying this stuff for all that long. And so, when new evidence emerges - and in the case of Younger Dryas it is extensive - it freaks out and dismays the scientists whose theories came before it, because now their theories will cease to matter, if Younger Dryas is correct, and I am sure it will prove to be. So this is why you have all the infighting among scientists, and the flinging of accusations like "pseudo-science" against someone who has new information. Entrenched scientists understandably don't want to lose their funding, but again, we are relatively new in these studies, and the findings that are coming in about Gobekli Tepe and the Younger Dryas Impact Event will, in the long run, withstand all the name calling and will stand up to scrutiny to become the new standard of prehistoric knowledge. /////
Read the books for yourself if you are interested. Andrew Collins is the author.
That's all I know for tonight. See you in the morning. Tons and tons of love.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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