Scraps on Cinema

At some point in the development of one of his most revered classics, director Akira Kurosawa chose to change the title from "The Life of Kanji Watanabe" - an inverted homage to one of the project's inspirations, Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich  - to the simpler, bolder "Ikiru," meaning "To Live." One of his screenwriters, Shinobu Hashimoto, considered it pretentious, though Japanese audiences apparently disagreed enough to make the film a minor financial hit, in advance of Ikiru  going on to persistent international acclaim as a highlight of Kurosawa's lengthening, prestigious resume. I suppose Hashimoto may have had a point. "To Live" is rather much, even if it fits the Capra-esque, sentimental naturalism of the film. At any rate, "Ikiru" packs a further phonetic punch for film lovers who don't speak Japanese. (English-speakers especially are suckers for three-syllable Asian words and names: harakiri, samurai, A...

At the time that Richard C. Davis was building up his light-weight body armor manufacturing company Second Chance out of the town of Central Lake, Michigan in the early '70s, the United States was still just at the very beginning of a spectacular rise in violent crime that would peak in the '90s. And despite a precipitous decline in crime overall since that peak, the resonant insecurity of that period continues to inform and inspire much of our nation's politics and cultural rhetoric, to say nothing of our production of new popular archetypes. Among the most enduring of these has been the myth of the vigilante anti-hero, satirically predicted by Peter Boyle's titular role in the John G. Avildsen-directed, Norman Wexler-scripted Joe released in the summer of 1970, but then incrementally denuded of its philosophical ambivalence by the Dirty Harry  films starring Clint Eastwood, the Death Wish  franchise starring Charles Bronson, and their many exploitation imitators. Dav...

This past February marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Neil Young's Harvest  album. Though quite commercially successful, and supported by the two hit singles "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold," critical reception for the record way back in 1972 was decidedly mixed. And with a half-century's difference, though Harvest  has gradually become accepted as one of the seminal works of folk rock, it's doubtless that there will still be those who quibble over where it ranks in terms of the prolific singer-songwriter's early catalogue. Nonetheless, one probably can't discount how significant the album must have become for the young Neil in that same amount of time. Having gradually built his rock reputation since the mid-'60s through his association with the short-lived psych-pop act Buffalo Springfield and the hippie supergroup he formed with Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash, he was only in his mid-20's when recording sessions f...