Evanston: a pretty good MOBY DICK; solitary trees;
the most entertaining movie; “conquest”
Evanston: a pretty good MOBY DICK; solitary trees;
the most entertaining movie; “conquest”
I chanced upon ENCORE’s recent remake of MOBY DICK, starring William Hurt, Ethan Hawke, and a computer generated whale. The two part mini-series, running a total of three hours, got a lot of bad reviews; but I liked it and so did the NY TIMES. Two such distinguished sources cannot be dismissed.
I’ve read MOBY DICK three times: the first as a land-locked teenager in a Saint Louis suburb with no experience of the sea. It has never been one of my favorite books, and I’ve only reread it to see if I like it more with age. I don’t, because Melville’s novel is only ⅓ interesting and ⅔ dull. I think the ENCORE version more than reversed that ratio.
I picture Ahab thin, his obsession with the white whale consuming his flesh as well as his spirit. William Hurt does not fit this image. He is an Ahab a bit stout, unexpectedly scholarly, but ultimately mad. His eyes express profound changes. I found his performance impressive.
While there were some solecisms--too much sail set during a storm, etc.--I thought the series did a reasonable job depicting life at sea on a whaling ship.
And while the whale wasn’t quite believable, I thought he was pretty good, too.
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The 1972 film, YOUNG WINSTON, was made after Churchill, himself, suggested the idea to producer, Carl Foreman. One of Churchill’s quotes is: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
This is another movie I saw when it was first released and again only recently.
A then unknown Simon Ward stars as young Winston, supported by a strong cast, including Robert Shaw as his father, Anne Bancroft as his American mother, who was in reality even more beautiful, and Anthony Hopkins as David Lloyd George.
While I am not an unequivocal admirer of Winston Churchill, I have read many books about and by him, including his THE RIVER WAR, on which some of this movie is based, about the Kitchener expedition up the Nile to defeat the forces of the Mahdi at Omdurman near Khartoum in the Sudan.
In 1982 I passed through Khartoum on my way back to California after my grandmother’s death, and learned that the Sudanese view the Mahdi as a hero not an insurgent.
Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself Mahdi in 1881, was an orphan.
About him, Winston Churchill wrote: Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
In his biography of his father, Winston’s son, Randolph, noted that although he had a family--his father died when Winston was twenty--Winston, too, was a solitary tree, with distant parents. He rarely spoke with his father and wrote pitiable letters to his mother, futilely begging her to visit him at school or let him come home.
As I recall, Randolph Churchill added to Winston’s comments about solitary trees, that if they survive, they will be strong, but they will be marked by the experience.
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In 1956, I was a teenager, certainly solitary, possibly arboreal, reading MOBY DICK and seeing for the first time Michael Todd’s AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS. I already wanted to sail alone around the world, and the film re-enforced that desire.
I liked AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS in 1956 and I like it just as much 55 years and several viewings later. Carol and I watched it a few nights ago, having recorded a recent screening on Turner Classic Movies.
I expect that all of you have seen AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS at one time or another.
I find it to be the most entertaining of movies. Not the greatest. Not the most profound. Just the most entertaining.
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Although for reasons I have discussed here in the past I don’t like heights, I’ve often felt that my approach to sailing is more analogous to that of mountain climbers than other sailors.
THE WILDEST DREAM: The Conquest of Everest is a National Geographic documentary in which Conrad Anker, the American climber who found George Mallory’s body 75 years after he died on Everest, returns to the mountain to investigate the question as to whether Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, reached the summit before their deaths.
The flaw in this production is found in its title. “Conquest” I think not.
We do not conquer mountains or oceans. Only fools with imprecise minds think so. Or PR agents. Which is redundant. We merely transit them. Mountains and oceans are unchanged when our footsteps in the snow and wakes in the water vanish. Mountains and oceans don’t care. They don’t possess ‘fury’ ‘mercy’ or ‘cruelty.’ You have never read me write of ‘the cruel sea’ or seek its ‘mercy,’ and never will.
There were also repeated references in the film to Mallory’s climb being “The End of the Golden Age of Exploration.” Again, I think not.
Climbing mountains is not exploration any more than sailing alone around the world is, except exploration of the edges of human experience, and that won’t end until the species does. The Golden Age of Exploration began with the Portuguese and ended long before 1924.
In THE WILDEST DREAM, the modern climbers make a gesture of trying to climb in clothing and equipment similar to that worn by Mallory and Irvine. They soon revert to modern gear, proving that whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit or not, they were tougher than Anker and his young British climbing partner.
Despite these serious flaws, THE WILDEST DREAM is worth viewing for the spectacular photography and the background of Mallory’s life. Of particular interest to me was the stress his intrinsic need to climb put upon his marriage to a woman he loved at first sight.
From all that I have read of George Mallory, I believe that he was the genuine article, the true flame. Go out, going forward. A man, a woman, cannot do better.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011