By Jason Apuzzo. Those of us here at Libertas want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.
If you live in America, in almost any circumstance, you have a great deal to be thankful for – because you’re living in freedom.
Today we wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving by giving everyone the opportunity to watch a great film from 11 years ago from Wim Wenders, called The Buena Vista Social Club. This extraordinary, Oscar-nominated documentary is about a group of artists who did not live in freedom – living, instead, in Castro’s Cuba – yet who refused to let their circumstances dim their spirits, or destroy their art.
If you’ve never seen this film, take the opportunity over this weekend to watch it – here (through SnagFilms), for free. The music is extraordinary, Ibrahim Ferrer is unforgetable, and you may find yourself shedding a few tears by the end.
By David Ross. Between 1961 and 1968, Rolling Stone co-founder and music critic Ralph Gleason hosted twenty-eight half-hour episodes of Jazz Casual on public television. There wasn’t much glitz: Gleason would say a few words of introduction and his musical guest would be off to the races. Even so, Jazz Casual was probably the purest dose of cool ever delivered by American TV. In 2006, all twenty-eight episodes – 840 minutes worth – were released as a DVD box set titled The Complete Jazz Casual, but the set is now, alas, unavailable. Netflix offers three episodes – Basie, Gillespie, and Coltrane – on a single disc, as well as discs devoted exclusively to Coltrane, Brubeck, and B.B. King.
John Coltrane & Miles Davis.
Coltrane, of course, is like some astral event that comes around only once in many lifetimes; to see and hear him is to witness something epochal.
Jazz aficionados should also make a particular point of viewing, via Netflix, Miles Davis: Cool Jazz Sound (2004), a 25-minute dose of the Miles Davis Quintet – Davis, Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb – filmed in New York in April 1959. Davis and Coltrane are such spectacularly paired opposites, the former’s angular reserve balancing the latter’s delving, groping virtuosity.
By Joe Bendel. In the late 1960’s United Kingdom, trade unions dominated industrial policy, but did chauvinism trump class warfare? 187 women find out when their strike brings the mighty Ford plant to a standstill in Nigel Cole’s Made in Dagenham, which opened Friday in select theaters nationwide.
In one of the all time penny-wise-pound-foolish decisions, Ford reclassified the seamstresses working at their plant in the London suburb of Dagenham as “unskilled” rather than “semi-skilled” workers. This naturally resulted in a corresponding pay cut for the women. Encouraged by Albert, the factory’s union rep, they vote to authorize a work stoppage if their semi-skilled status is not reinstated. Though not previously active in the union or politics of any sort, Rita O’Grady is selected to attend the negotiations between Ford and their union. She is supposed to sit quietly in the corner, but when Monty Taylor, the feather-bedding head of their Local tries to sell out the Dagenham women, O’Grady gives them a case of what’s what.
Jaime Winstone disrobes for social justice.
Suddenly, the strike is on. However, the parameters have widened. With the encouragement of Albert, a former military officer raised by his single working mother, the Dagenham women are insisting equal pay for equal work. With 55,000 men now out of work, the union leadership is decidedly unenthusiastic. Ford is not too thrilled either. However, Barbara Castle, Harold Wilson’s minister for labor relations is quite impressed by the Dagenham women, while her boss is rather befuddled by it all.
Dagenham is a mostly harmless, Swinging Sixties Norma Rae, yet it veers awfully close to the patronizing attitudes it takes pains to skewer. We are clearly meant to cheer when O’Grady asserts herself with the sexist old boys around the negotiating table, but why shouldn’t she? William Ivory’s screenplay never actually uses the term “plucky gals,” but one can feel it floating in the air.
While Dagenham frames the issues surrounding the strike in simplistic terms, at least it earns credit for its pointed portrayal of the union leadership – a venal, Marx-quoting lot of chauvinist pigs. Of course, the overall membership is the salt of the earth, who eventually rally to the Dagenham women’s cause. Yet wisely, the film resists the dour naturalism of most union movies. Instead, it gives us Jaime Winstone in a mini-skirt.
Do not get the wrong impression though, Winstone (daughter of Ray) is mere window dressing. Dagenham is clearly intended as a star turn for Sally Hawkins – and certainly she is ‘likable’ enough. Everyone in the film is likable, unless they are management, in which case they are despicable. However, Hawkins’ soft-spoken, twitchy performance makes it hard to understand how she becomes such as a galvanizing force.
Granted Bob Hoskins’ big speech is ridiculously manipulative, but he still sells it, supplying the film’s most heartfelt moments. Though Wilson incisively contrasted himself with his Conservative opponent’s aristocratic background during the 1964 campaign, John Sessions plays him like an upper-class twit, emasculated by a look from Miranda Richardson as Castle – but at least they also supply some dramatic flair.
It might be faint praise, but Dagenham could have been far worse. When in doubt, Cole clearly opted to keep the tone light, which makes the film watchable – even if it is predictable and stilted. It opened Friday in New York, Los Angeles and in select theaters elsewhere.
By Jason Apuzzo. Ingrid Pitt, one of my favorite cult movie stars, sadly passed away yesterday at age 73.
Pitt became famous in the late 60s/early 70s as one of Hammer Films’ impossibly glamorous horror queens, appearing in films such as The Vampire Lovers, Countess Dracula and The Wicker Man – and, to this day, Pitt is still remembered as easily the sexiest vampire ever, a title she earned by way of The Vampire Lovers.
I first became familiar with Ingrid Pitt, (born ‘Ingoushka Petrov’) by way of her iconic role as ‘Heidi’ in the 1968 classic Where Eagles Dare, starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. Pitt’s turn in that film as the “pretty Alpine rose” and saucy double-agent Heidi was – and remains – the stuff that male dreams are made of. Oh my! No one made fighting the Nazis look more sexy and glamorous than Ingrid Pitt.
The unfortunately thing is that until I began reading the articles about her today, I hadn’t actually known much about her very dramatic and challenging life – nor how tragically ironic her casting in Where Eagles Dare was. I’ve posted this lengthy excerpt below from today’s UK Guardian:
UK Guardian
She was born Ingoushka Petrov in Poland to a Jewish mother and a German father who was a scientist and refused to work on the Nazis’ programme to develop rockets. Pitt was five when she and her mother were sent to the Stutthof concentration camp, where they remained for three years. “I think I first knew I wanted to act in the camp,” she said. “I used to lie on the straw and try and believe I was somewhere else.”
What every vampire should look like.
When they were taken into a forest to be shot, Pitt and her mother managed to escape and were rescued by partisans. They spent the last year of the war living rough with the partisans, before making their way to Berlin. “I was born into the biggest horror show of the century, the brutalities of the Nazi regime,” said Pitt. “I think it’s very amazing that I do horror films when I had this awful childhood. But maybe that’s why I’m good at it.”
After a brief spell as a medical student, Pitt became a member of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theatre company. When she got into trouble for criticising the communist authorities, she made her escape to the west, aided by a US marine officer, Roland Pitt, whom she soon married. After living for a period on a military base in Colorado, she got a divorce and returned to Europe with her daughter, Steffanie.
During a few years in Spain, she appeared uncredited in several Spanish films and got work as an extra on David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago and Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (both in 1965). She was eventually given a leading role in the wretched low-budget sci-fi film The Omegans (1968), shot in the Philippines and directed by W Lee Wilder, the brother of Billy Wilder.
On the set of "Where Eagles Dare."
In the same year, Pitt landed the part of a German double agent posing as a cafe waitress in the popular second world war yarn, Where Eagles Dare. (“And who might you be, my pretty alpine rose?”, asks Richard Burton, dressed in a Nazi uniform in the film.) “I had to say I was German to get the role and I didn’t like that,” Pitt said. Most of the film’s interiors were shot at the MGM-British studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, and it was then that Pitt began her love affair with England. She later married the British former racing driver Tony Rudlin, with whom she settled in London. It was “the longest Pitt-stop of his career”, she once quipped.
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Read the rest of this article here. And you can read more about Ingrid Pitt, and see clips of her work (as well as an interview) here. Our condolences to her family. This pretty Alpine rose will certainly will be missed.
Today we wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving by giving everyone the opportunity to watch a great film from 11 years ago from Wim Wenders, called The Buena Vista Social Club. This extraordinary, Oscar-nominated documentary is about a group of artists who did not live in freedom – living, instead, in Castro’s Cuba – yet who refused to let their circumstances dim their spirits, or destroy their art.
