Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

'Cary, Cary, Cary!' Tribute time for screen legend Grant, who left us 25 years ago

Interviewer: “Everybody would like to be Cary Grant.”Cary Grant, in response: “So would I.”So goes the story about arguably Hollywood’s most debonair leading man ever. Archibald “Archie” Alexander Leach, known to the world by his stage name, died 25 years ago this month at age 82.During his 34-year film career, he made 74 movies, beginning in 1932 with “This Is the Night” and wrapping up in 1966 with “Walk Don’t Run.” In all that time, he never played a villain — a good call!

Why did so many Nazis get away with murder?

Simon Weisenthal’s greatest contribution to the world was his dogged pursuit of Nazi criminals who escaped punishment at the end of World War II. His second greatest contribution was his reminder that despite being described as “the Good War” or “a just war,” not enough good was ultimately done, and comparatively little justice was meted out. Some of the most prominent and heinous architects of mass murder simply got on with their lives, and some were the recipients of largesse — jobs, travel assistance, even money and government protection — that was denied to the people who endured their cruelty. And we tend to forget that for every high-ranking sadist or mass murderer who was imprisoned or executed after the war, thousands more who assisted them directly (through action) or indirectly (through silence) were never even called to account.

Maureen Dowd: Dirty Harry Meets Dirtier Edgar

Maureen Dowd is a New York Times columnist.I ASK Clint Eastwood, the star who defined macho in 20th-century movies, what it was like to direct a scene with two men kissing.Especially when it’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer playing a rule-bending and gender-bending version of J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.Stretching out his Giacometti legs in the Four Seasons bar, the rangy 81-year-old said he juiced up the action to make it a fistfight that suddenly turns erotic. Or as Eastwood circumspectly puts it, “It becomes an expression, at least from one of the parties — maybe both — of borderline something else.”A director who prides himself on his economy (one or two takes often suffice) and frugality, Eastwood said: “It moved so fast, nobody had a chance to feel awkward. Afterward there were some jokes.”...

Checkpoint Charlie Museum

While there are hundreds of military museums around the world, Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, or the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, is one of few memorials that expressly document the tyrannical force of dictatorship — in this instance, the Communist cruelty that operated with an iron fist thanks to a methodically conceived Iron Curtain. The museum ranks with far wealthier museums that document the horrors of fascist tyranny, such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.The story of the Berlin Wall begins on Saturday, Aug. 12, 1961, a seemingly lackluster summer day in Berlin. Residents from the eastern and western parts of town traveled to their favorite summer spots, to luxuriate in the last summer rays of the sun. Little did they know that something strange was unfolding, and by the end of the night, casually traversing to the opposite end of the city would become impossible. It would be a day Berliners would never be able to forget, and a day Rainer Hildebrandt’s Checkpoint Charlie Museum will try to make sure the world too never forgets....

Finding the Humanity in the F.B.I.’s Feared Enforcer

Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.

Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye: ‘The Silent Majority’: Directors’ Statement

Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye are the directors of the upcoming film “Our Nixon.” Ms. Lane, a visiting professor at Bard College, has been awarded grants from Cinereach, the New York State Council on the Arts, Independent Filmmaker Project, the Experimental Television Center, LEF Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Mr. Frye, a visiting assistant professor of law at Hofstra, has had work shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Film Festival.

N.C. Museum of History opening its largest exhibit

RALEIGH -- Things that fit inside the North Carolina Museum of History’s new exhibit, its largest ever:Two full-size houses.Authentic tobacco and textile mill façades, two stories apiece....The Story of North Carolina exhibit winds its way across 20,000 square feet and 14,000 years of history....The first half of the exhibit, which ends just before the Civil War, is already open. The second half, opening Saturday, starts at the War between the States and travels through Reconstruction, industrialization, two world wars and the Civil Rights movement, up through the present decades of rapid growth and the descent of The Big Three (furniture, textiles and tobacco) as the state’s primary employers....

Exhibition at National Archives celebrate the role of government in controlling national diet

Bruce Cole, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.Chef José Andrés is the “Chief Culinary Advisor” for “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet,” an exhibition now at the National Archives in Washington. In his introduction to the show’s catalogue, the chef writes that the exhibition inspired him to partner with the National Archives Foundation to launch a new restaurant, America Eats. Although Andrés is better known for paella than pot roast, his new venture — located, we are helpfully told, “just steps away” from the Archives building — features a neo–New Deal menu.“What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” documents the influence of Washington over our diet through an engaging selection of documents, photographs, and posters from the Archives’ vast collection. Although the exhibition is admirably concise, the sequencing of the displays could be less complicated and clearer; at times the viewer struggles to understand which direction to take....

An American Minority’s Road to Rights

It may be the least-publicized revolution of our time but the one whose impact ultimately reaches the furthest, affecting the way our buildings and buses are built, the way our schools are structured, the way our businesses conduct hiring and outfit their work stations. It’s the disability-rights movement, and “Lives Worth Living,” a Thursday “Independent Lens” on PBS, reconstructs how it emerged and eventually pushed through the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.The film opens with images from the past that are chillingly grim, especially those from the Willowbrook State School for children with intellectual disabilities on Staten Island, a nightmarish place exposed by, among others, a young television reporter named Geraldo Rivera in 1972. (Recent headlines have made clear that, four decades later, such problems persist in some places.) “There was a belief,” Ann Ford, director of the Illinois chapter of the National Council on Independent Living, says bluntly, “that if you had a disability, you didn’t have any desire to live a life.”

Do Chinese Pioneers Get Railroaded in AMC’s ‘Hell on Wheels’?

The tale of the building of the transcontinental railroad, the steel band that wed the metropolitan East to the frontier West, is among the greatest in American history.“It was the moon launch of its time,” says Chuck Vollan, assistant professor of history at South Dakota State University — an epic feat of engineering, human effort and national resolve. William G. Thomas, history professor at University of Nebraska and author of the new book “The Iron Way,” concurs, but adds that if anything, its impact was even more immediate and dramatic. “In a few short years, the railroad transformed society in ways that people of the time could never have imagined,” Thomas says. “It completely revolutionized communications and commerce. For people of that era, the railroad was the Internet.”That’s why the announcement by AMC — the cable channel responsible for “Mad Men” and the breakout zom-drom hit “The Walking Dead” — that its next big original series, titled “Hell on Wheels,” would be set against the backdrop of the railroad’s construction triggered a surge of interest and hope in the Asian-American community. AMC at first indicated that the stories of Chinese Americans would not be part of the series. But in a statement sent to Speakeasy, the creators of the series now say they may broaden the show in coming seasons....

Playwright attempts to bring MLK ‘to life’

Playwright Katori Hall says her job is to put human beings - not saints - on the stage. In Hall’s new Broadway play The Mountaintop, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, Dr. Martin Luther King receives no special treatment. The Reverend King is stripped of his superhero status and portrayed as a man who smoked, drank and was a shameless flirt. He has holes in his socks and his feet smell. One moment he's a grand orator and lecturer; the next he’s chauvinistic and self-assured, at times even acutely paranoid, grave and forsaken. "It just brings him to life," Hall says, "and brings back the desire to push forward and continue his legacy, and rethink where we are as human beings, where we are as Memphians. He's not a statue."

PBS documentary on War of 1812 certain to surprise some viewers

Two centuries after the fact, a PBS-TV producer has decided to set the record straight on the War of 1812 for an American audience.Larry Hott's two-hour documentary, The War of 1812, airing Monday at 9 p.m. on Detroit Public TV, Channel 56, promises to open a lot of eyes south of the border about what is a forgotten and ignored war in American history books.It was a learning experience for the filmmaker himself."When we were asked to make this film, all we knew about the war was that it happened in 1812," said Hott, who co-produced and directed the film for the Buffalo, N.Y., PBS affiliate, WNED-TV .To Americans, the War of 1812 is little more than a footnote."It's really misunderstood," said Hott. "If you see it mentioned at all in books, it's usually about the mythology that came out of it."...

Film review: “The Devil's Double”

Lee P. Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. There has been a great fanfare surrounding the cinematic release of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, “the anti-Bond movie par excellence,” according to the Independent. The 127-minute film, says the Daily Record, is a “slow-brewing, elegant retelling of John Le Carré’s Cold War novel.” The Guardian even goes as far as to suggest that Tomas Alfredson’s work is “the film to beat at [the Venice] festival.” Yet “things aren’t always what they seem,” as Toby Easterhase says to George Smiley, the main protagonist. While it features the “best British line-up” of the year, talk of “damn fine acting” (Total Film), an “utterly absorbing” storyline (Empire) and “engrossing thriller” (Telegraph) reminds this cinemagoer more of The Devil’s Double. I say this not because Lee Tamarhori’s flick about a drug-fueled, diabolically-unhinged dictator’s son and his “fiday” contains a riveting double performance by Dominic Cooper. Nor do I for the reason that the director has produced an absorbing thriller about (and based on the memoir by) lookalike army lieutenant, Latif Yahia, who is summoned to Baghdad near the end of the Iran-Iraq War and forcibly recruited to serve the role of body-double for Uday Hussein.

Landmarks of early Soviet cinema come to DVD

For a time in the mid-to-late 1920s the art of the cinema meant only one thing to the serious-minded film critics of America and Europe: Soviet-style montage, or the art of cutting shots together in a way that would produce ideas and emotions beyond those expressed in the images themselves.The concepts could be simple ones, as in Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiments: the same close-up of a man looking into the camera could equal “fatherly love” when juxtaposed with the image of a baby, or “empty stomach” when juxtaposed with the image of a loaf of bread.Or montage could be pushed to elaborate, symphonic heights, as in the celebrated “Odessa Steps” sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin.” Playing contrasts in content (czarist soldiers versus protesting townspeople), composition (slashing diagonals versus stable triangles) and rhythm (the relentless march of the soldiers, the aimless bounce of the abandoned baby carriage) against each other, Eisenstein achieves a fuguelike effect of enormous complexity and emotional power.

Heroic Tale of Holocaust, With a Twist

PARIS — The stories of the Holocaust have been documented, distorted, clarified and filtered through memory. Yet new stories keep coming, occasionally altering the grand, incomplete mosaic of Holocaust history.One of them, dramatized in a French film released here last week, focuses on an unlikely savior of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France: the rector of a Paris mosque.Muslims, it seems, rescued Jews from the Nazis.“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”) is a tale of courage not found in French textbooks. According to the story, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, provided refuge and certificates of Muslim identity to a small number of Jews to allow them to evade arrest and deportation....

Richard T. Watkins: Samuel L. Jackson: The Right One to Play MLK

Richard T. Watkins was a sophomore at Morehouse College in 1968.There could be no better choice than actor Samuel L. Jackson to portray Martin Luther King Jr. in the upcoming Broadway play The Mountaintop. Jackson was a student at King's alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, that fateful April evening in 1968 when the civil rights leader was assassinated. The actor acknowledges that his life and career were profoundly affected by that event.It will be Jackson's Broadway debut, in a role he relishes. The play takes place on April 3, 1968, the night before the civil rights leader was slain. The plot follows King back to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., after his prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech. There he confronts his legacy shortly before death.A Night to RememberThe evening 45 years ago when the awful news of King's assassination was broadcast is permanently etched in the memories of all of us who attended Morehouse at the time. "I was angry about the assassination but not shocked by it," Jackson, who'd been a budding social activist at the time, later told Parade magazine....

George Harrison gets the Scorcese treatment

TO the fans who thought they knew him George Harrison was both omnipresent and enigmatic. Of the four members of the world’s most famous band, the Beatles, Harrison made the least effort at being a public figure, and though he shared himself in recordings as disparate as the catchy pop of “Taxman,” the desolate strains of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and an album of spiritual chants and music that he produced for the Radha Krishna Temple, he could be inscrutable and distant behind it all.

Review: “America’s Planned War on Britain” on UK TV

Lee P. Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. The days of a commander in chief going down the United Nations route to help a prime minister placate domestic opposition to war, as George W. Bush did with Tony Blair in 2002, are over, notwithstanding what historian James Ellison says in the current edition of BBC Knowledge about the future of the ‘Special Relationship’ looking bright (“Old Friends,” Sep/Oct 2011). Do not get me wrong, Ellison competently examines the past and present of Anglo-American relations. But he overlooks the fact that, for all President Obama’s talk of an “extraordinary special relationship” during a brief meeting at the UN HQ in New York, forthcoming government defence cuts will mean a decline in Britain’s ‘hard’ power.

What’s a Presidential Library to Do?

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — When Republicans gathered at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum here for the presidential debate last week, the backdrop was an overhauled exhibition on the Reagan presidency, done under the watchful eye of Nancy Reagan. It is intended, in part, to be a more complete depiction of the Reagan presidency, replacing one that many had seen as a bit too worshipful and airbrushed.But another exhibition that just opened at yet another presidential museum not far away — the Watergate installation at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda — has offered a stark challenge to the Reagan tribute here, exposing both the different ways that these two museums have chosen to remember their subjects and the different positions that the two former presidents hold in the nation’s and the Republican Party’s memory.

Nebraska dental museum opens wide with history

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Dr. Stan Harn glances over his spread of primitive dental tools and grabs a T-shaped metal instrument with a hook on one end.This, he explains, is a turnkey. It looks like, and may have inspired, the modern-day basin wrench. The metal hook goes into a patient's mouth and latches onto a damaged tooth. The dentist clutches the handle and twists. Turn too hard and patients could — and sometimes did — lose a piece of jaw."You can see the amount of torque it generates," Harn said. "It was brutal."The turnkey is arguably the most cringe-inducing tool in a University of Nebraska Medical Center collection that includes foot-powered drills, wartime dental chairs and X-ray machines with exposed wiring. The College of Dentistry will show off such tools at its free, once-a-year museum that will be open Monday through Saturday in Lincoln....