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

Early Hour for War Series, Salty Language and All

As it begins a 10-month publicity push leading up to the September 2007 broadcast of Ken Burns’s new documentary series on World War II, PBS plans to announce this week that the programs will be shown at 8 p.m., even though a couple of episodes contain obscenities. Mr. Burns has maintained all along that his seven-part series of “The War” would be shown at 8 p.m., particularly because he wants it to be seen by young people who did not live through the war and its aftermath. But som

Stanley Kauffmann: In praise of Flags of Our Fathers

A soldier, all alone, climbs the top of a mountain on Iwo Jima. The summit is wide terrain scarred by battle. The field is deserted. The soldier is bewildered. Then we see the same man years later, now white-haired, waking from a nightmare, comforted by his wife beside him. Thus two elements of this film are fixed at once: the time planes and the haunting. These are the first minutes of Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's new film about the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. When word

Museum to tell Marine Corps' story

QUANTICO Homer Zartman counts himself among those who helped build the National Museum of the Marine Corps' collection from the ground up. The Surry County resident discovered a wealth of items after his father, a Marine who served in France during World War I, died in the early 1970s. He donated his father's garrison cap, binoculars, original-issue razor, uniform leggings, medals, ribbons, dog tags and more to the museum. "It's a way to honor him, his memory and a

Photographs of an Episode That Lives in Infamy

During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America’s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams. But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lan

From Robben Island to the red carpet

At the orphanage he runs, deep in the far-flung hills of Mpumalanga province in north-eastern South Africa, Patrick Chamusso is suffering from jet lag. But he grins with pride at the laughing children playing in the dirt with a little Oscar statuette and a snowstorm paperweight containing a plastic White House. 'You should have seen me in New York,' he says. 'I had my own car and driver! The Four Seasons Hotel! But that is not true life. This is my home and working with these child

The day Hollywood sent James Stewart to a brothel to make a man of him

Root around the history of Hollywood, and you won't find many too stars with a cleaner, more wholesome reputation than Jimmy Stewart. But that, hasn't stopped his latest biographer from digging up the dirt. Marc Eliot, author of a previously acclaimed biography of Cary Grant, says the notoriously tyrannical MGM boss, Louis B Mayer, was so concerned about the young Stewart's apparent lack of interest in ladies he forced him to visit a brothel so people wouldn't start gossiping that he was gay. The episode may say more about the glorious clash between Hollywood licentiousness and American puritanism than it does about Stewart. But it also opens a window on an era when actors and their reputations were effectively owned by the studios that held their contracts, and subject to extraordinary manipulations....

Navy's Blue Angels Aerial Team Turns 60

Touring with the Blue Angels was supposed to give Ernie Christensen a respite between deployments as a combat pilot in Vietnam. But Christensen, a retired rear admiral who went on to command the Navy's Top Gun fighter school, said flying with the Blue Angels was sometimes more demanding than combat. "In your last 30 seconds coming aboard a carrier, you have levels of concentration, and in combat there are those few moments of stark terror when you have intense co

Fire Destroys Historic Chicago Home by Sullivan

Fire early Saturday destroyed a historic North Side house designed by renowned architect Louis Sullivan, the third of his buildings brought down by flames this year in the city. No one was inside the house and no injuries were reported, said Fire Department spokesman Kevin MacGregor. The wood frame building had been undergoing renovation, he said.

The masters are coming to London

Paintings by Goya never seen in this country are to form the centrepiece of a dramatic exhibition at the Royal Academy next year of portraits from "the age of revolution" between 1760 and 1830. The period, informed by the Age of Enlightenment, revolution in France and America and social and economic upheaval all over Europe, is virgin territory for an art exhibition.

Another WWII film, another open wound

More than 700 African-American Marines served on Iwo Jima in World War II, running ammunition to the front lines and burying the dead, among other harrowing duties. These men, in addition to facing the Japanese, had to endure bitter racism from their white counterparts. When they came home they received no respect or honor for their sacrifice. These elderly warriors are asking why they are being made to feel the same neglect again. Hollywood has made another movie, call

American wins France's top literary prize for his novel about a fictional SS officer's memoirs

An American, Jonathan Littell, on Monday won France's top literary prize, the Goncourt, for his novel "Les Bienveillantes" (The Kindly Ones, or The Well-Meaning Ones), about a fictional SS officer's memoirs.The prize jury said Littell's debut novel easily triumphed over a field of three other works from French authors with a 7-3 vote. The book is already a sensation in France, where it sits atop the best-seller list with more than 250,000 copies

Just a Hardy Bunch of Settlers Who Left America and Moved to California (Documentary)

“Commune,” a breezy, informal history of the Black Bear Ranch, a long-running California commune begun in the summer of 1968 and still in existence, offers the fascinating spectacle of observing people then and now. This loose-jointed collection of reminiscences by several dozen people who lived on the ranch — hippies and political idealists who “moved there to get away from America,” as one original member puts it — is crammed with pictures and old home movies. Juxtaposed with the

UA started with artists in lead role

When CEO Harry Sloan gives visitors a tour of MGM's airy executive offices on the 14th floor of the MGM Tower in Century City, he enjoys pointing out an antique document in one of the display cases. The paper in question is the founding agreement that Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and director D.W. Griffith signed in 1919 when they decided to take control of their careers by joining to create their own motion picture company, the United Artists Corp. Until Thursd

Pollock world's most expensive painting

A classic "drip" picture by Jackson Pollock is believed to have become the world's most expensive painting after it was sold in America by the Hollywood entertainment mogul David Geffen for $140 million (£75 million).   In a private deal brokered by Sotheby's, the painting 'No.5, 1948', has been bought by David Martinez, a Mexican financier. The price beats the recent record set by the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder who paid $135 million (then £73 million

A Hopeful, Rather Than Sensational, Look at a Politician (RFK movie)

It’s been some time since the Kennedy name has been a simple code word for hope, courage, social justice and the like. In America’s pop obsession with the illustrious family, the name in recent years has more often hit the headlines for scandal and tragedy, accident or addiction. But rehabilitation of a sort is at hand if Emilio Estevez, an unabashed Kennedy admirer who wrote and directed “Bobby,” has his way. Mr. Estevez’s drama about the night of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination

Dead Stalinists Society: Review of the new film, Catch a Fire

[Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.] The new film Catch a Fire centers on a campaign to blow up a South African oil refinery. Key to the operation is Patrick Chamusso, who joins the anti-apartheid fighters of the African National Congress (ANC) after being falsely accused of another attack, arrested and tortured. Patrick also has some family difficulties but things work out for him and his coun

New-York Historical Society Mounts Second Exhibition on Slavery

In November 2006, the New-York Historical Society will launch its second major exhibition on the topic of New York's relationship to slavery and the abolitionist movement. The focus of the second exhibition will be on New York's rise to national and global economic power as the nation itself confronted slavery and racial inequality. The period under investigation will begin about 1815 and continue through the Civil War and its aftermath. Although hundreds of significant works of art, objects and

US welder who became the father of steel sculpture wins Tate's acclaim

When the American artist David Smith began welding his vast works from steel, no one even considered them sculpture. But 100 years after he was born in the artistically unpromising environment of the Midwest, he is being honoured with an exhibition of his work at Tate Modern in London. The show includes more than 70 works, starting with early experiments in the 1930s through to sculpture made not long before he was fatally injured in a car crash in 1965.

Sacked director resurrects his Superman, 30 years on

THE film director who was fired by telegram midway through shooting his sequel to Superman is to finally release his version of the film after nearly 30 years. Richard Donner, who was replaced as director of Superman II after a spectacular falling out with his producers, will release his director’s cut of the film on November 20. The new version, which includes 15 minutes of previously unseen footage of Marlon Brando playing Superman’s father, is radically different from the cinema

Trojan hero gets Hollywood spin in new Virgil translation

Robert Fagles, a retired professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, feels he has come to know the poet Virgil as well as anyone in history after spending 10 years translating his epic, The Aeneid. His hope now - shared by his publisher - is that many of us will want to share that familiarity. Judging by Fagles' past success with two of the other great tomes of ancient literature - The Iliad and then The Odyssey - he can be excused his optimism. Both translations b