Daily Archives: August 22, 2011

Moby

How do you prefer your Gregory Peck – soft-spoken and dignified, the way he played Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, or crazed and peg-legged, the way he played Captain Ahab in Moby Dick?  John Huston directs Peck in this 1956 whale of a tale.  Click here to watch it for free.

 

© 2010-2024 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

Share

by Eric Hodgins

Blandings
                                                                      

Mr. and Mrs. Blandings want to build their dream house on Connecticut’s Bald Mountain, but somewhere beneath the grounds of their serene and scenic property lurks a roiling, mischievous stream of water.  I can’t think of a better analogy for Hodgins’s clever prose, which is all propriety and elegance on the surface – and a whirlpool of repressed anger and despair down below.

That’s a blueprint for high comedy as we follow the hapless Blandings, two city slickers who run afoul of country anti-bumpkins in their quest to build the American Dream, circa 1946.  Try as the Blandings might to fit in with their new neighbors, alas, it is not to be as tensions on both sides of the cultural divide threaten to – and periodically do – erupt during construction of the jinxed house.  

This might not say much for human nature, but as an observer it can be wicked fun to sit back and read about someone else’s misery.

 

© 2010-2024 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

Share