"Newman, Kim - The Pierce-Arrow Stalled, And..." - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim) hobo. He'd have done good in the movies before they went to hell. Not
really a kid, either. His name was Jimmy Stewart. They were up around the fire that burned most nights in the middle of Agry. It'd been a ghost town five years ago, when Johnny came to get away from the G-Men. Now its population was up to gold rush numbers. As American servicemen were poured into the so-called Holy War in Mexico, more and more kids drifted in. Inverting W.C. Fields' catch-phrase, the draft-protestors cried 'give this fucker an even break'. Nearly a million young men disappeared from the record books. They aped Henry Fonda and Woody Guthrie in Blowin' Down This Road, gathering in abandoned railroad sidings and backwoods towns. Several states had chosen to tolerate these shadow communities, but there were still Sheriff's Deputies with baseball bats. 'Don't you want to be a soldier-boy, son?' 'Not in this war, Mr Dillinger. I don't mind what Cбrdenas does in his own country. It's not the fight I care for. That one's in Europe and the Pacific.' Most Americans felt that way. The war was Coughlin's crusade and plenty, of all political persuasions, wanted out of it. The President was just a jumped-up radio preacher filling the shoes of a martyr. Some wanted America to tend its own garden and win back its lost children; some thought it'd need all its armies for the big war that seemed more likely every day. In the firelight, Stewart's face was set. Johnny thought he looked a little like a hero. Hollywood had missed something. Garbo Fucks! Ninotchka (1939). The climax couldn't top the scene where Rhett laid Scarlett down on the red stairs, ripped open her clothes and rutted with her for a full five minutes. The King reputedly wanted his crown back and insisted he be allowed to go better than Flynn. Since that steamy interlude, the audience had been getting restless as tragedy piled upon tragedy. The plantation burned as the Jayhawkers encroached. The guerillas were played by Hollywood Mexicans. It boiled down to whether you were interested in the love or the war, Roscoe supposed. The love stuff was over in the plot, but the war went on. It was supposed to be the Civil War but he knew better. When a city burned or a wounded soldier limped, he thought not of Atlanta in 1864 but Tijuana in 1940. This was the movie that summed it up, the feelings of a whole generation. A new generation. Roscoe, a jolly relic from an innocent age, was bewildered, and a little blue. His films had been for children; even the grown-ups of 1922 were children next to the hard-eyed youngsters scattered through the auditorium of Grauman's Chinese. Orson Welles was the new von Stroheim, Keaton claimed. As powerfully as he felt assaulted by Gone With the Wind, Roscoe agreed. On his best days, he had never been one-fourth the director this kid - another fatty, they said - was. If he grew a heart as he got older, he might be better than Griffith, than Chaplin. |
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