MOVIES
HE AVANT-
If Louis B. Mayer, the Hollywood mogul, had lived until the late 1960s, he would have been startled by some of the changes in the tastes of movie-going Americans.
True, the lines would have been longest at theaters offering such easily recognizable Hollywood fare as Dr. Dolittle or Paint Your Wagon. But in the larger cities and college towns, a good many movie fans would have been elsewhere. Some would have been thronging local "art" theaters to see Ingmar Bergman's T...
"The coming of the motion picture," newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst once said, "was as important as that of the printing press."
Hearst, as was his wont, exaggerated a bit. But during its humble beginnings in a Medo Park, N.J., laboratory, nobody could have guessed what an enormous impact on Americans' fantasies, mores, and morals the motion picture would have-least of all its inventor, the re- doubtable Thomas Alva Edison.
Edison and his assistant, William D...
dpdf-doc>
The mind, wrote John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667), "can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n." Metaphor or spiritual reality, men's notions of Hell have always reflected developments within their earthly societies as well as the ruminations of philosophers and poets. Here, historian Alan Bernstein ponders the major West- em views of Hell from the ancient Hebrews to the present.
Hell today is enveloped in silence.
Among those in the West who unquestioningly accept its...
U.S. officials, after the disputed "snap" election of February 7 and massive street pro- tests. Weeks passed before he would begin to talk to newsmen in Honolulu. Marcos conceded, finally, that his days in the Mala- cafiang presidential palace were over. Speaking of Corazon Aquino, his successor, who had to deal with the problems Marcos left behind (including a $26 billion foreign debt and a Communist insurgency), the ex-President was patronizing: "Poor girl, she may have bitten off...
. Humorist Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" said that no one was sure if they were "islands or canned goods." One legend had President McKinley scur- rying to a globe to see where "those darned islands" were.
In reality, U.S. and European firms had established commercial houses there many decades earlier to trade for hemp. The isolation imposed by Spain continued to erode in the 19th century thanks to steamships, the Suez Canal, and the laying of submarine cables.
The...
. When independence came, in 1946, Quezon was in his grave. As forecast, Roxas was President, and he had much to ponder.
With the removal of U.S. authority, the Philippines had to for- mulate a government system that would respond not to the wishes of America but to its own needs. Filipinos had evolved a pattern of social relations pre-dating Spanish times that linked peasants and landlords in a mutually beneficial patron-client relationship. Central to it was a concept of mutual obligations known...
. He recognized his countrymen's love of fiery oratory, and he did not disappoint them.
The Filipino has lost his soul, his dignity, and his courage!" Ferdinand Marcos said. "We have ceased to value order." The gov- eminent was "in the iron grip of venality. Its treasury is barren, its resources are wasted.. .its armed forces demoralized." He would need help. "I ask for not one hero alone among you, but for many."
So began a 21-year drama that would culminate...
' national hero. He fos- tered the idea of a "Filipino" identity.
This book, published in America as The Subversive (Indiana, 1962, cloth; Norton, 1968, paper), and a previous novel, Noli Me Tangere (The Lost Eden, Greenwood, 1968), were written in Europe. There Rizal led the Propa- ganda Movement, a group of emigres who sought to "awaken the sleeping in- tellect of the Spaniard" to native ambi- tions. Biting portraits of life under Span- ish rule, the books were banned in the...
Shortly after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's move to Vermont in 1976, a Soviet diplomat told an American television interviewer that the Nobel laureate was like the kidnapped boy in 0. Henry's story "The Ransom of Red Chief." One day, he warned, the United States would pay the Soviet Union to take its troublemaker back. So far, Washington has not made any offers, despite Solzhenitsyn's repeated denunciations of the West as weak-willed, decadent, and godless. Readers of Solzhenitsyn's novels...
Adam Parry and Richard M. Dorson, shocked his fellow scholars arguing that the Iliad and Odyssey had been orally composed and recited by wan- dering bards for several generations before being written down.
For at least a century, scholars of an- cient writing have split hairs over such questions as whether Homer was the sole author of his epics and whether the alphabet spread from a single source or was independently invented in several places. Among the notable works in this tradition are archaeolo-...