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Lenore Coffee, born in 1897, wrote 50 or more silent films and any number of studio productions in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Her most notable achievement at Warner Brothers was the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Four Daughters, co-written with Julius J. Epstein in 1938. Epstein, with his twin brother Philip and Howard Koch, wrote Casablanca.…
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When I was a Brooklyn 'yoot', back there in the 40s and 50s of the previous century and millennium, Saturday afternoon movies at the Leader Theater were all Westerns. Randolph Scott in his sombrero, Debra Paget in her Apache buckskins, gunfights, bar brawls, cavalry charges, dreaded Comanches shooting arrows into circled Conestoga wagons or falling…
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Here's a picture of the house in which we lived from 1969 to 1973. It's 1521 9th Street in Boulder, Colorado. It's a small, old Craftsman, probably right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog, which retained, in those years, many of its original dark-wood-and-stained-glass beauties. It was good to us but there weren't enough…
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Nang yai is an intriguing form of Siamese drama, a shadow play with puppets, which, unfortunately, I have never seen performed — in fact, never been to Thailand, alas, or anywhere else in that part of the world. The "puppets" are large, almost three-quarters life-size, made of painted buffalo hide. A story, drawn from the…
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Otzi the freeze-dried 5300 year old Tyrolean man/mummy continues to be studied and his corpse regularly yields new information. Otzi was about 45 years old, stood 5'3" and weighed only about 110 pounds. He had been wounded with an arrow in the shoulder which pierced an artery. He may have bled to death or,…
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Our new president has an extraordinary ability to believe what he wants to believe, no matter the fact. He mocks a disabled reporter, we all see it with our own eyes, and yet he denies that he did so. He claims that his inauguration was the best attended in history, and then we look at…
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On February 11, an "intruder" was discovered in the parking garage of the downtown condo where I now live. Actually, I found him myself. I had to run a late night errand, unusual for me, and there he was, scruffy and dirty, hanging out near the elevator. I said to him, "are you lost?" and…
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I didn't "get" Shane when I first saw it in 1953 when I just fourteen, and I didn't ''get" it again last night when I watched it for the fourth or fifth time, lifetime. It's a watchable film in my considered opinion but I have no idea why various canon-creators have ranked it third or fourth among…
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Evolution was inordinately fond of beetles. According to the coleopterists, there are some 400,000 species, with many more still to be identified. Beetles are everywhere. Every time I introduce a new plant into my garden, along comes a species of beetle new to me. Nevertheless, I must admit, to my shame and embarrassment, that I can call only a…
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There are two memorable moments in Kent Haruf's competent, enjoyable and posthumous novel, Our Souls at Night (2015). The first is the proposal that Addie Moore make to Louis Waters that starts it all off. Addie and Louis are long spouseless and in their seventies, solitary. Addie calls on Louis and says, without much preparation, "I wonder if…