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More Vidal (Review of MYRON)

I wrote this book review for The Village Voice shortly after I moved to London from Paris in 1974 (which helps to explain how I could cite the English paperback of Myra Breckinridge), so I was more than likely a little miffed when the Voice noted at the end of the piece, “Jonathan Rosenbaum is a film critic presently living in Paris.” Although I think this review suffers a bit from the Voice’s overheated smart-alecky manner during this period, which I was only too willing to adopt (and which makes some of my gripes potentially open to the charge of the pot calling the kettle black), I was reminded of both this review and Myra Breckinridge/Myron while recently reading Vidal’s somewhat similar 1978 novel Kalki, which has a similarly formidable heroine-narrator with a comparably ambiguous relation to gender. —J.R. [4/3/09]

More Vidal

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Myron

Gore Vidal

Random House, $6.95
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Myra Breckenridge was a stunt: a clever gay trick pulled on a straight audience—or, if one prefers, a bisexual prank pulled on a unisexual audience—with kibitzers and spectators welcome on either side of      the ironies, different jokes for different folks. Brightly paced and packed with goofy comic-strip action and characters, it was motored by a kind of  cheerful nihilism that usually kept Vidal several steps ahead of the reader, whatever his or her sexual preferences. It had enough fun to half-disguise the fact that its principal notion of urbanity was a gentlemanly expression of nausea for Hollywood, le nouveau roman, all non- aristocratic Americans, and apparently every variety of sex apart from some form of sadism or masturbation.

Myron, the sequel, is another kind of stunt—also good for a lot of giggles, but much less unified in its strategies, and clumsily stuck together compared with its predecessor. Its departure is wonderful. Myron, the male-turned-female-turned-male of the previous book, passes straight through his TV screen, like Alice, into an imaginary Maria Montez movie, Siren of Babylon, while it’s being shot in 1948. What’s more, Myron’s free to move about the frozen actors and sets during the commercial breaks, is buffeted about by the cuts, submerged by the fadeouts, and transported by the dissolves.

A nice conceit, and plenty of fantasy writers could turn a concise novella out of it. Vidal opts instead for (1) ushering Myron into Hollywood proper in 1948, where he tries to find his way back to the present, and (2) having him turn back into Myra in alternate chapters, as kinky as Myron is straight, and hell-bent on remaining in 1948 so that she can revolutionize the world via Hollywood and build the bisexual utopia prophesied in her own book—by altering details in the production of Siren of Babylon (a lifted loincloth here, an exposed breast there), performing history’s first sex-change operation on some helpless and hapless male, and taking over the movie industry in her spare time (today MGM, tomorrow the planet). Such a setup, allowing one sexual-psychological transformation (Myron to Myra or Myra to Myron) per chapter break, and lots of ensuing burlesque, doesn’t prevent Vidal from pulling off a number of other sideshows—which includes Myra becoming Maria Montez and a revised global situation back in 1974.

It’s fast and funny and full of surprises. It is also, for long stretches, abominably written. Exhibit A: “…I have just learned that during my five years’ absence not only has President Johnson left us but also Jeffrey Hunter, born Henry M. McKinnies, whose memorable starring role in King of Kings was the last important Hollywood film.” Roles are not films, and the Myra we once knew wasn’t so sloppy that she’d botch a sentence like that. She was even something of an intellectual—a fact you’d never guess from the present book, which homogenizes her earlier self almost as cheaply as the Myra Breckinridge movie did. (Roughly speaking, Myra II is to Myra I what Tom Sawyer, Detective was to Huckleberry Finn.)

In other words, it’s trashy—not elegantly trashy, like Myra, but trashy  about its own premises. Consider for a moment Vidal’s special brand of cuteness (Exhibit B). The English edition of Myra contains the following note from the author: “Wanting in every way to adapt to the high moral climate that currently envelops the British Isles, the author has allowed certain excisions to be made in the text.” Pretty cute, that. His formula for Myron, explained in a preface, is even cuter: for all the potentially censorable words he substitutes the names of the Supreme Court justices who concurred in the majority decision to have local communities to define pornography. A clever conceit, but it’s worth noting that Malcolm Muggeridge pulled essentially the same trick about 10 years ago, in the New York Review of Books, to ridicule a book by Wayland Young—a ploy which sought to make the opposite (i.e., bluenose) point.

And this is at the nub of what bugs me about Myron: all of its smartness is instantly convertible into dumbness, suggesting that maybe its tactics aren’t so smart after all. On other occasions, Vidal professes to be serious about his bisexual utopia; giving his favorite slogans to a character as demented as Myra implies either a notion of Spreading the Word to the Masses in mutilated form or something less than honest about his serious stances. Either way, it’s a sellout deserving just the sort of contempt that Vidal heaps so liberally on his favorite adversaries in the New York Review of Books—that meeting place and clearing-house for minds as variously similar as Mssrs. Vidal and Muggeridge, where all cuteness becomes kin. (TV talk shows provide a comparable haven.)

Nevertheless, Myron is a good quick read with lots of laugh at. Wait till it comes out in paperback and take it on a bus ride; it’s just possible that even by then such gags as the guest appearance of Nixon (appropriately wearing a rubber Nixon mask) will carry some kind of lift. Most of Myron’s sections are a bit labored—Vidal seems too remote from Middle America to be able to parody its clichés with any pleasure or conviction—but the zany exploits of Myra. His spirited alter ego, will keep you going. And best of all, you’ll be hard put to remember a single phrase of it once you get to wherever you’re going.
—The Village Voice, November 14, 1974

COCKFIGHTER (1974 review)

This is excerpted from my “Paris-London Journal” in the November-December 1974 Film Comment, written in August when I was starting work at the British Film Institute after living for five years in Paris.

I can’t recall now whether it was this review or my inclusion of Cockfighter on my ten-best list in Sight and Sound — or could it have been both? — that led eventually to Charles Willeford sending me a note of thanks, along with his a copy of his self-published book A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided, a short account of his own hemorrhoid operation. Not knowing Willeford’s work at the time — today I’m a big fan, especially of his four late Hoke Mosley novels — I’m sorry to say that I didn’t keep this book, which undoubtedly has become a very scarce collector’s item.

But first, before reprinting the Film Comment review, here is my capsule review of Cockfighter for the Chicago Reader, written almost three decades later and published in mid-August 2003: “Except for Iguana, which is almost completely unknown, this wry 1974 feature is probably the most underrated work by Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop). Shot by Nestor Almendros on location in Georgia (partly in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown, which seems appropriate), it follows the absurdist progress of a man who trains fighting cocks (Warren Oates in one of his best performances) and who takes a vow of silence after his hubris nearly puts him out of the game, though he continues to narrate the story offscreen. Produced by Roger Corman as an exploitation item for the drive-ins, this performed so badly in that capacity that it was recut and retitled more than once (as Born to Kill, Wild Drifter, and Gamblin’ Man). But as a dark comedy and closet art movie, it delivers and lingers. With Richard B. Shull, Harry Dean Stanton, Millie Perkins, and Troy Donahue. 83 min.”

August 12: Monte Hellman’s COCKFIGHTER. On his own more modest level, Hellman seems to be attempting much the same game as [Roman Rolanksi’s in CHINATOWN]: to elicit all the necessary cheers from the peanut gallery while continuing to play some of his favorite formalist tunes in the bass clef, intermittently abstracting the material at hand. In CHINATOWN – to my eyes, at any rate – the formalist counter-line is minimal and mainly submerged, arising on occasion to take the center (as when we hear, and then see, workmen scratching a name off an office door), but usually kept on the fringes of the Time Magazine-cover characters, who clog up most of the remaining space. In other words, the formal games seem to be played around and between the characters rather than – as was more often the case in WHAT? -– waged through them.

In COCKFIGHTER, the accommodation of the commercial and formal strains is rather more complex, involving interaction as well as co-existence. The peanut gallery merges with the cockfighter spectators in the film, and Hellman manages to suggest the point – without ever forcing it – that watching a movie called COCKFIGHTER is fundamentally just about as ridiculous as watching a cockfight. Working in a genre that is every bit as conventional and predictable as the private-eye story, Hellman comes up with something much closer to genuine absurdism than Polanksi’s cocktail party cynicism.

Consider the plot: a cockfighter (Warren Oates) loses two bets and two birds. One of the victors advises him that he drinks too much and talks too much, and Oates immediately takes a vow of silence, not to be broken until he’s proclaimed Cockfighter of the Year. (To sidestep this refusal in narrative terms, Hellman permits him occasional offscreen remarks as narrator, mainly laconic factual observations.) He joins forces with a Polish immigrant who supplies betting money, birds, and encouragement, and ultimately wins the coveted medal.

It is difficult for me to think of a more idiotic and gratuitiously brutal sport than cockfighting. I happen to find the daredevil flying in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and the car-racing in RED LINE 7000 almost equally ridiculous ways for grown men to spend their time, but perhaps for just this reason I have no difficulty in accepting both these activities in both Hawks films as metaphysical metaphors — even though Hawks insists on treating and honoring them literally, as camped-up reflections of his own experiences with cars, planes, and the men who drive them.

I haven’t the foggiest notion of what Hellman thinks about cockfighting per se, but the fascination with games and competitions that persists through THE SHOOTING and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP is always tempered by the dryly comic notion that all of them are pretty silly. And nothing could be sillier than the aspirations and exploits of Oates in COCKFIGHTER. One isn’t necessarily persuaded that he loses because of his bagging or drinking, or that he wins because of any intervening moral growth or increasing amount of expertise. (After all, it is his Polish partner who gets him on his winning streak, and the fights ultimatelyb belong to the birds, not the bettors.) For all the arcane bits of inside information that Oates imparts about his trade, he mainly comes across as a likable, brainless twerp who nurtures a mythical sense of purpose, like some variant of Hemingway’s Old Man of the Sea recast as Don Quixote in a hillbilly context.

The cutting edge of Hellman’s treatment of this Roger Corman quickie can be seen in the wonderful crowds that he collects around the cockfights, the uncanny talent for directing rural speech to make it sound like crazed ritual incantation. As a native of Alabama, I have a sore point about Yankee approximations of Deep South accents and gestures that are indifferently observed; next to such models of precision as THE PHENIX CITY STORY, BABY DOLL, and WILD RIVER, the grotesque caricatures in films like SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, I WALK THE LINE, THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED, and (much as I regret to say it) Renoir’s THE SOUTHERNER tend to drive me up the nearest wall. Suffice it to say that in both his direct use and his paraphrases of the look and speech of local yokels, Hellman has an infallibly witty and accurate ear and eye.

In fact, the mean, caustic bite of the humor in COCKFIGHTER reminded me more than once of Flannery O’Connor. The evangelist hero of Wise Blood observes at one point that any man that’s got a good car don’t need to be justified, and the obstinate pride and conceit of the Oates character about his own stature seems to belong to much the same world. (The cockfights themselves inevitably suggest the depiction of one in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and O”Connor is one of the few serious disciples of West, most of all in her treatments of violence.) Is it by chance or design that Hellman sets his climactic cockfight in Milledgeville, Georgia, the town where O’Connor lived for most of her life? (For all I know, the setting may have come from the novel the film is based on, or some inside knowledge about cockfighting circuits, but the possibility seems worth noting.) This isn’t a major Hellman job, but it will do just fine until one comes along. Less interesting than THE SHOOTING and less pretentious than TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, it is at the very least an engaging minor treat.

Badlands (1974 review)

This appeared in the November 1974 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. The ironic aftermath of the final sentence in my review is that another five years would pass before the release of Malick’s second feature, and then 20 more before the release of his third. — J.R.

Badlands

U.S.A., 1973                                                        Director: Terrence Malick

It would hardly be an exaggeration to call the first half of Badlands a revelation -– one of the best literate examples of narrated American cinema since the early days of Welles and Polonsky. Compositions, actors, and lines interlock and click into place with irreducible economy and unerring precision, carrying us along before we have time to catch our breaths. It is probably not accidental than an early camera set-up of Kit on his garbage route recalls the framing of a neighborhood street that introduced us to the social world of Rebel Without a Cause: the doomed romanticism courted by Kit and dispassionately recounted by Holly immediately evokes the Fifties world of Nicholas Ray -– and more particularly, certain Ray-influenced (and narrated) works of Godard, like Pierrot le fou and Bande à part. Terrence Malick’s eye, narrative sense, and handling of affectless violence are all recognizably Godardian, but they flourish in a context more easily identified with Ray. Unmistakably Malick’s own, however, is the narration and dialogue: like the movie’s violence, it remains laconic, idiomatic, detached, and chillingly real throughout, whether it’s reflecting on the visual action, enriching it, compressing it, or sharply deviating from it (as when Holly narrates her uncertainty about whether Kit’s capture was deliberate –- in the past tense -– while we’re shown that it is). Less sustaining, alas, is the sense of discovery illuminating the film’s first part: the further that the couple proceed in their travels, the more familiar and twice-told their story seems to become, grasping after sociological observations that were interesting when they figured in Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, The Honeymoon Killers, Targets, et al., but are uncomfortably close to platitudes in 1974. The stylistic familiarities, on the other hand, appear too quickly and variously for them to fall into predictable patterns. Holly occupying a bed with an enormous dog; her disappointment with her first foray into sex, and Kit picking up a stone to commemorate the event (substituting a smaller one when he finds it too heavy); a balloon carrying souvenirs sent off for posterity; Holly’s father painting a primitive landscape on a billboard in the middle of a primitive landscape; the integration of Holly’s greenish dress with the blue hallway in her house; the lyrical interlude (worthy of Fahrenheit 451) of fire consuming the house, “distanced” by the use of silence and [Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s] “Musica Poetica”; the fairy-tale ambience and irony of the forest sojourn, Kit reading National Geographic while Holly muses pantheistically on the soundtrack; her attempt at small talk about a pet spider with a dying Cato [Ramon Bieri]; sepia newsreel-like glimpses of police and frightened townsfolk: all these are too striking as images and as ideas, and too neatly abstracted out of their immediate contexts, to fit into traditional genre expectations. But evidence of Kit’s cheerful craziness -– delivering homespun advice about education into the rich man’s dictaphone, shooting a football that becomes “excess baggage” en route to Montana –- appearing at first to be refreshingly non-psychological in implication, start to set up an inevitability of their own, suggesting both psychology and contrivance once they start to accumulate. As the landscape grows wider, and the literal and figurative notion of a destination for the couple grows increasingly remote, the story-line shrinks and stiffens, as though returning to its journalistic origins. (According to William Johnson, the plot is based on the exploits of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate across the Dakota badlands in 1958.) Carrying Kit to the airport, one of the deputies remarks to the other: “I’ll kiss your ass if he don’t look like James Dean”. The line, inflection, and the expression on the officer’s face are perfectly rendered, but we recall that Holly has already made this comparison (not to mention Malick himself, in an image echoing Giant), and sense the pressure of a director striving too forcibly to impose a point. Similar strictures apply to the repeated use of a Satie piece and Kit’s flamboyant farewell to his “fans” at the airport. But a long time will have to pass before one forgets the words, gestures, and faces of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek — and hopefully a short one before the arrival of Terrence Malick’s second feature.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1974, vol. 41, no. 490

Bedlam (1974 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1974 (Vol. 41, No. 490). — J.R.

Bedlam

U.S.A., 1946 Director: Mark Robson

London, 1761. Attempting to escape from the St. Mary of Bethlehem lunatic asylum, commonly known as Bedlam, a poet named Colby is forced by Sims, the apothecary general in charge, to drop from a railing, and he falls to his death. Lord Mortimer and his ‘protégée’ Nell Bowen, passing by in a carriage, question Sims about the incident, and are assured it was an accident. After subsequently paying a visit to the asylum, Nell is appalled by the living conditions and Sims’ sadistic treatment of the inmates, and appeals to Lord Mortimer to make a charitable donation. But Sims dissuades the latter from doing so. When Nell joins forces with John Wilkes to turn the cause into a political issue, Sims contrives to have her declared insane and committed to Bedlam. Frightened for her safety — and securing a trowel from Hannay, a sympathetic Quaker brickmason, for protection — she none the less elicits the respect and loyalty of the other inmates, and when Sims locks her in a cage with a supposedly dangerous lunatic, she successfully placates her cellmate. The trowel has meanwhile been mysteriously stolen. When Sims threatens to subject her to a ‘treatment’, before a hearing to reconsider her sanity is held, the other inmates capture him and hold a mock trial. He is judged to be sane, but just after he is released, he is stabbed by a female inmate with the stolen trowel and then sealed in a chamber that is mortared up with bricks by the inmates. Nell and Hammay are happily reunited, and look forward to improving the lot of the mentally ill.

Initially banned in England, and finally making its appearance some twenty-eight years after its American release, Bedlam is a disappointingly weak and lackluster Val Lewton effort, particularly in relation to the more celebrated films that preceded it. In a project that cries out for the dark ‘period’ imagination of an Anthony Mann or a James Whale — or barring that, some of the baroque atmosphere of a John Brahm — one is offered some semblance of the characteristic Lewton virtues (taste, reticence, literate if overly fancy dialogue) without a style or vision forceful enough to weld them together into something meaningful. Sagging not a little under the weight of its honorable intentions, the film seems to suffer from a network of counter-strategies, all effectively working against each other. In an enterprise claiming as its departure point a moral objection to ‘looking at the loonies’ for entertainment, it is singularly unconvincing to pursue this concern while half-heartedly attempting to hold the audience’s attention with entertaining inmates. One suspects that such an inconsistency derives more from confusion than from impure motives — indeed, a greater amount of duplicity or sheer bad taste might have given the film more life than it has. As it stands, Bedlam is too cautious and tentative about its vaguely educational aims to carry much moral or amoral force, although it skitters about fitfully in both directions. Its vision of good, as incarnated by Hannay, seems hopelessly square and stilted (“I’m a stonemason. I build well. Let other people build well and this city will become a clean and pleasant habitation”), while its vision of evil — left to Karloff’s Sims — consists of arbitrary and seemingly obligatory acts of malice or pronouncements of humorless sarcasm pumped into the plot in order to keep it going. The beauty and energy of Anna Lee is regrettably not bolstered by the sort of direction that can sustain a performance, much less a film: Joel E. Siegel reports that one of her dresses is a “Vivien Leigh hand-me-down from Gone With the Wind“, and there’s a teasing Scarlett O’Hara ambience about her playing which doesn’t jell too well with the Florence Nightingale role that the script eventually requires her to assume — an overtone that becomes especially jarring in her scenes with the stolid Richard Fraser. Karloff does what he can with a pasteboard part, underplaying his effects, while Billy House registers as a poor man’s Eugene Pallette; the self-contained elegance of Ian Wolfe in a more modest lunatic part, however, proves that precision in small matters is a worthy achievement even in the murkiest of circumstances.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

THE NIGHT PORTER (1974 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1974, Vol. 41, No. 490. — J.R.

Portiere di Notte, Il (The Night Porter)

Italy, 1973 Director: Liliana Cavani

Cert—X. dist—Avco-Embassy. p.c—Lotar Film. A Robert Gordon

Edwards/Esa De Dimone production. A Joseph E. Levine presentation

for Ital Noleggio Cinematografico. p—Robert Gordon Edwards. p. staff–

Umberto Sambuco, Dino di Dionisio, Roberto Edwards, (Vienna) Otto

Dworak. asst. d–Franco Cirino, Paola Tallarigo, (Vienna) Johann

Freisinger. sc–Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati. story–Liliana Cavani,

Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani. ph–Alfio Contini. co1–Technicolor;

prints by Eastman Colour. col. sup–Ernesto Novelli. ed–Franco Arcalli.

a.d–Nedo Azzini, Jean-Marie Simon. set dec–Osvaldo Desideri. m/m.d–

Daniele Paris. cost–Piero Tosi. sd. ed–Michael Billingsley. sd. rec–

Fausto Ancillai. sd. re-rec–Decio Trani. post-synchronisation d–Robert

Rietty. sd. effects–Roberto Arcangeli. l.p–Dirk Bogarde (Max),

Charlotte Rampling (Lucia), Philippe Leroy (Klaus), Gabriele Ferzetti (Hans),

Giuseppe Addobbati (Stumm), Isa Miranda (Countess Stein), Nino

Bignamini (Adolph), Marino Mase’ (Atherton), Amedeo Amodia (Bert),

Piero Vida (Day Porter), Geoffrey Copleston (Kurt), Manfred Freiberger

(Dobson), Ugo Cardea (Mario), Hilda Gunther (Greta), Nora Ricci

(Neighbour), Piero Mazzinghi (Concierge), Kai S. Seefield (Jacob).

10,603 ft. 118 mins. English version.

Vienna, 1957. Max, a sadistic SS officer during the war, conceals

his former identity in a job as night porter in a luxury hotel, where

he caters to the jaded tastes of some of his former colleagues, also

in hiding at the hotel. Together they have formed a self-styled

‘therapy’ group, accumulating evidence of their former atrocities

so that it can be destroyed while they exorcise their feelings of guilt.

Shortly before Max’s past is due to be reviewed by the group, the

unexpected arriyal at the hotel of Lucia Atherton — a concentration

camp victim of Max’s sadism who became his lover, and is presently

married to an opera conductor — stirs up Max’s memories as well

as her own. Lucia fails to reveal Max’s identity to her husband, and

when the latter leaves for Frankfurt she chooses to stay behind,

promising to join him later in his concert tour. Before long, she and

Max have resumed their sado-masochistic affair. Max refuses to

acknowledge Lucia to his former colleagues, and after she moves in

with him and ignores the efforts of the police to locate her, Max’s

fellow Nazis lay siege to the flat, fearful that the couple’s behaviour

will lead to their own exposure. After access to food, electricity and

water has been cut off for an extended, period, Max and Lucia

emerge from the flat in their former outfits — his SS uniform and

her party dress — and are shot down on a bridge.

A plot composed almost exclusively of implausible characters

and improbable events; sound recording and post-synchronisation

atrocious even by Italian potboiler standards; shots, dramatic

situations and gimmicks seemingly imitated or approximated from

Last Tango in Paris; sluggish pacing and laborious exposition . . .

Theoretically, one could be describing the latest anonymous

exploitation film. What chiefly distinguishes The Night Porter from

this familiar category are two significant factors, possibly related:

(1) the film has a Nazi-related theme which it pursues with

ponderous intransigence, and (2) it has been widely acclaimed for

its seriousness, audacity and overall achievement by critics on both

sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the only credible explanation of this

second factor is a simple confusion of thought with deed, or subject

with treatment. There might, conceivably, be something to be said

for the film’s potential thematic interest apart from the sure-fire

formula of combining sex and Nazis — namely, the sexual impulses

that are suggested or touched upon by the Nazi horrors, and the

related ambiguities reflected in Max’s shift of role from persecutor

to victim. If Cavani had established her intrigue in either a believable

setting (e.g., a Grand Hotel containing more guests than her central

characters) or a stylistically coherent non-realistic one, and delineated

it with even a modicum of visible intelligence, originality,

consistency or taste, the strength of her theme alone might have

sustained the film. But quite apart from the numerous Last Tango

replays (which extend from a virtual substitution of jam for butter

in a ridiculously over-acted sexual interlude to a fancy pan across

a bridge in nothing less than the final shot), the performances are

sufficient to place the film in the realm of the grimly risible: Charlotte

Rampling, looking rather embalmed throughout, alternating

between two or three c1iché poses (usually Caged Animal or

Martyred Jeanne d’Arc), and Dirk Bogarde’s understandably

uncomfortable efforts to link together all the stray notions of his

character dictated by the script into some recognisable form of

behaviour, which results in the spectacle of a talented actor skating

in grease — and a parody of the various tics he has used to better

effect in previous sadist or masochist roles. As if this weren’t

enough, the concentration camp flashbacks are delivered with all

the trappings of the worst salon art: trite arrangements of bed-

frames to suggest prison bars bathed in kitschy hues of copper or

smoky blue, decked out with arty camp-victim poses, and

accompanied at one point by passages from The Magic Flute –

as if to guarantee the project’s cultural credentials, and at the same time

certify the universal significance of a subject that the director

apparently felt needed some tarting up. Beside such a sensibility,

the visual rhetoric of a film like The Pawnbroker (with its otherwise

comparable flashbacks) seems in comparison a model of integrity,

formal daring, ethical courage and restraint.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM