AT LARGE

Childhood memories of black and white television. The Lone Ranger.  “Hopalong” Cassidy. Wyatt Earp. Gene Autry. Gabby Hayes. Bass Reeves. Who? Bass Reeves. He was not on the list of western heroes who filled the screen with 30-minute installments of fantasies about the taming of the frontier. His moment came many decades later when, after a lengthy development process, the limited series drawn from the [...]

With the shorter days and early darkness of winter, the screening of Napoleon began as an afternoon matinee and ended as night fell. It is a long film, spanning years of turmoil and combat in the early years of the 19th century.   The “Reign of Terror” had finally come to an end and the new “rock star” of the French people, Napoleon Bonaparte, emerged [...]

Ah, it’s December! It’s time to roll out the traditional holiday favorites:  Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, Polar Express, It’s a Wonderful Life, and that all-time classic, Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler on the Roof? True, the musical based on Tevye and His Daughters by Sholem Aleichem, is not a Christmas story. Far from it. Set during the time of the Jewish pogroms in [...]

There are powerful rhythms in art, music, and literature that certainly don’t subscribe to a strict 4/4 time. Images will reappear years after we first see them. Passages from books that were favorites a decade ago will suddenly manifest themselves in an article, a quote on the late news, or a weather-worn bumper sticker on the car ahead of us at a traffic light. A [...]