A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRESomething went gloriously awry when Elia Kazan staged Tennessee Williams’ poetic parable of antique Southern illusions colliding with postwar urban brutishness. The young Marlon Brando made Stanley Kowalski a manifesto for sexual menace that defines American acting to this day. The 1951 film version, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois, restores equilibrium [...]
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS SARA GRUEN JACOB JANKOWSKI has never had fantasies about joining the circus. But when his parents die suddenly, he freaks out, drops out of vet school, hops a freight train and winds up tending to the menagerie of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a third-rate Depression-era traveling circus. What [...]
MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUSTHE PERSONAL BEST SERIES
Obsessives–and is there another kind of Python fan?–can argue endlessly over which of the cerebral troupe’s bits are the funniest. Here, the five surviving members choose for themselves (and on behalf of the deceased Graham Chapman) in this six-disc series. Alongside well-known classics (“The Lumberjack Song,” “The Spanish Inquisition,” [...]
ASTAIRE & ROGERS COLLECTION VOL. IHe was a geek with brilliant feet, she a pert blond chorine. Yet when Fred took Ginger in his arms and led her across a ballroom floor, he not only defined the film musical but also, deep in the Depression, created a new ideal of “la belle, la perfectly swell [...]