Ever since I first saw the Mauch twins, Billy and Bobby, in the movie version of Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper, I’ve been keen on films where the actor plays a multiple role, like…
Posts published by “Clancy Sigal”
My son and I argue movies all the time. He thinks that the Academy and other film industry prizes are well deserved while I can’t recall a Golden Globe or Oscar for a movie I…
This week marks the 50th anniversary of “Freedom Summer” and the murder by Mississippi Ku Kluxers of three young civil rights volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and “Mickey” Schwerner. The triple killing was world news…
You’re driving at night in a General Motors compact car, a Cobalt or Cruze or Ion, and without warning the brakes, gas pedal and airbag suddenly give out. You hurtle into a tree and kill…
Veterans of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, an event that electrified young men and women world over, will return to campus for the fiftieth anniversary reunion this October. (If interested e-mail FSM50th@gmail.com.)…
It’s said that Shirley Temple is responsible for one of Graham Greene’s least good but most Catholic novels The Power & The Glory. In the late 1930s an impoverished Greene, scrounging for rent money, became the…
In my neighborhood I’m surrounded by Spanish speaking Latinos who work as gardeners, maids, dry wall and bulldozing construction, nannies of Anglo children and checkers in my local Ralphs market. Only on Cinco de Mayo or when my attention is drawn to a rash of gang killings are they truly visible to me.
I’m sure we all have better things to do than watch that emotionally involving, spacey-fiction example of Disraeli-era “one nation” Tory-conservative spin, Downton Abbey.
From her obituaries, and the serious critical assessments of her work, I hardly recognize the Doris Lessing I knew. I don’t fault the obit writers (I used to be one) or critics and admirers for…