April 2020
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I don't know why, but It's mandatory, in movieworld, that if a man stumbles away from an automobile accident, he must suffer from amnesia and he must suspect that he's murdered someone. On top of that, it's required that it will take the full ninety minutes to prove his innocence. The Third Day splits all…
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There are so many overlaps between Richard III (1593) and Macbeth (1606) that it sometimes seems as though Shakespeare pillaged and reformed the earlier play when he composed the later. Both plays feature cynical upward strivers ("hellhounds," the playwright calls them both) who risk damnation to murder their way to the throne, and then lose…
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Another automobile accident and another hospitalized amnesiac. Once again, the poor guy might have committed a murder, but he's not sure. And once again, there's a loyal young woman (Gina McConnell, played by Jennifer Jayne) to help him reconstruct his past. As well as a beguiling dangerous femme fatale and a double-dealing psychiatrist. Knockout drops,…
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I've now reported on thirty-two separate amnesia movies and there are surely many more out there to which I am oblivious. Why so many? How come Shakespeare didn't write an amnesia play? Why are there no classic novels about amnesia? Didn't unsuspecting folks get themselves bopped on the head in previous centuries? Didn't knights ever…
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I'm a movie lover, but I'm not indiscriminate. Here follows a list of common movie occurrences that compel me to return to nineteenth-century novels or force me to bury my head under the blankets. 1. Cute puppies, especially when the boy and the girl kiss for the first time, and the director, unfazed by cliche…
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This time, amnesia minus the amnesia. Heiress Matilda Frazier, presumed to have perished in a shipboard fire, returns home where she's met by Steven Howard who claims to be her recently-wedded husband. She fails to remember him for the good reason that she's never met him and hasn't lost her memory. It's a case of…
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In Cymbeline (1611?), Shakespeare, still innovating even at the end of his career, deepens the character of Innogen by supplying her with an unusual psychological trait. He presents her to us as an escapist or fantasist who leaps to imagine herself a different person in a different world. Here's Innogen early in the play, when…
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It's a commonplace that every one of us is improbable and accidental — a fluke of all flukes. The odds against you or me or any particular person being born, of coming into life, are infinitesimal — a positron's dimension (if positrons have dimension) shy of nothing, of zero. Why is any birth so unlikely? …
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This entry is written at the specific instruction of my daughter, who says, "your grandchildren will want to know about your birth. It's their history too." The following paragraphs are for them and for their descendants. My older sister, Susan, died of pneumonia at the age of nine months on March 15, 1938. If she…