All About Eve (1950)

Author Gareth Russell discusses one of the wittiest films of all time.

The story of All About Eve begins with what we'd probably call a stalker today. A young, obsessive fan of Margo's, called Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter), has been to the theatre every night for the last few weeks to watch Margo in her latest theatrical triumph as a feisty Southern belle. One of Margo's Society friends, Karen, has noticed this poor, bedraggled fan and brings her backstage to meet her idol. Eve tells a heartrending story about having lost her husband in the recent Second World War and how it is only the joy of theatre which allows her to escape her depression. Moved by her story and impressed by her apparent loyalty, Margo hires Eve to be her personal assistant. As the movie unfolds however, Margo begins to suspect that Eve may in fact be out to sabotage her. Eve's new friendship with Addison DeWitt and her cosy conversations with Margo's boyfriend and playwright-friends rile Margo's paranoia and insecurities. What follows is a wonderfully believable depiction of jealousy, cruelty, manipulation and, in one hilarious yet heartbreaking scene, drunkenness. (Read entire post.)

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Is Capitalism Flawed?

Russian dissident Solzhenitsyn dared to ask the question.

But when Solzhenitsyn committed the sin of criticizing the West in front of the 1978 Harvard graduating class, and dismissed Western social and economic policies as false alternatives for the world, those same European and American thinkers once cheering Solzhenitsyn as a champion for freedom consequently berated his scrutiny and ignored Solzhenitsyn’s social, political, and economic analysis, as well as any of his proposed reforms. (Read entire post.)

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The Affair of the Minuet

From History and Other Thoughts:

Life at Versailles was rigidly regulated by complicated and stifling rules of etiquette, which prescribed what the nobility, based on their ranks and position, could and couldn't do. Marie Antoinette may have hated all these rules but the nobility, jealous of their privileges, were capable of making a huge fuss out of the most insignificant thing when they felt their "rights" where threatened or ignored. In his book, Domestic anecdotes of the French nation during the last thirty years, Isaac Disraeli shares one of these petty squabbles, which happened at a ball to celebrate the wedding of the dauphin Louis with the archduchess Marie Antoinette...(Read entire post.)

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All Hell Let Loose

An analysis of the Second World War. (Via Serge.)

The eminent military historian Sir Max Hastings has already produced several weighty volumes on the Second World War, notably Armageddon, Nemesis and Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45. This work, subtitled “The World at War 1939-1945”, completes the record. Hastings himself describes it as a book “chiefly about human experience” in which he tries to show the whole picture, relying as much on civilian reports, letters, memoirs and diaries as on military sources. Warfare, if not a commendable activity for mankind, is a very ancient one and although it routinely shows the darker side of human nature, it clearly fascinates the author; he has set himself to answer the question, what happens when “almost everything which civilised people take for granted in time of peace [is] swept aside, above all the expectation of being protected from violence.”

The figures themselves almost overwhelm the reader: 60 million people died between 1939-45, both combatants and civilians, often in horrifying circumstances. Russia’s sacrifice of lives was immeasurably greater than all the other countries: 65 percent of the total. Hastings shifts his analysis from country to country as one by one they are dragged into the war, either by enemy invasion or in coming to the assistance of allies. Along the way he dispels certain myths that have hovered around the actual historical events; for example, that the German army in Eastern Europe was somehow untainted by the work of the SS death units which followed them. Hastings observes that from 1939, during the Polish campaign, “the officer corps of the Wehrmacht already displayed the moral bankruptcy that would characterise its conduct until 1945.”

He also shows the bungling and incompetence that are a characteristic of war and which often caused most casualties, commenting that in England “before peace came, accidents in the blackout killed more people than did the Luftwaffe.” The magnificent Churchillian rhetoric which Hastings rightly extols in his study of the wartime prime minister could not hide the fact that the British armed forces demonstrated continual “failures of will, leadership, equipment, tactics and training.” Where there was a will to win, as the author points out, it could not compete with the Russian or German brutal acceptance of the inevitability of huge numbers of casualties.

The Allied soldiers on the battlefield behaved like “reasonable men”; their opponents simply wanted to win, at whatever cost and showed “what unreasonable men could do”. There was a limit to what the Allied commanders could demand of their men; under democratic systems there would be a demand for enquiries and investigations, actions denied to the populations under Communism or Fascism.  Unlike Japan, “the concept of self-immolation was beyond the bounds of Western democratic culture” and it would have been “unthinkable” that the British would have eaten each other, as happened in Leningrad, rather than surrender London or Birmingham.

Interestingly, given the intellectual eminence of Germany, the author suggests that Britain’s claim to genuine success lay in the superiority of its application of science and technology.  The best civilian brains were mobilised in the war effort; the work of the boffins at Bletchley Park and the cracking of the German Enigma code were more effective in defeating the enemy than the campaigns in the field.

Germany’s invasion of Russia – Operation Barbarossa – is rightly given much space in the book. As Hastings comments, Hitler’s march into the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was the defining event of the War. Hitler had underestimated Russia’s military and industrial capabilities; and as with Napoleon, the sheer size of the country, coupled with the severity of its winters were critical in Russia’s eventual victory. Tellingly, on 28 November 1941, the German armaments chief, Fritz Todt, told Hitler, “This war can no longer be won by military means.” He favoured a political solution. Hitler dismissed the idea and in the four years that followed millions more were to die wantonly and needlessly. The siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad are vividly evoked in all their horror.

Yet as the author grimly reminds us, two million Russians also starved to death in territories controlled by their own governments; Stalin was as cynical about human life as was Hitler. His war aims, to grab as much territory in Eastern Europe as he could get away with, were equally selfish and at odds with human liberty. By the end of the war England and America were in no position to protest as the Iron Curtain came down. Hastings states, “The price of having joined with Stalin to destroy Hitler was high indeed.”

He is dismissive of the German defence, “We did not know” when mass atrocities came to light after the War, concluding that it was “impossible” for most German civilians credibly to deny knowledge of the concentration camps or of the slave labour system. Again, referring to the Holocaust, he judges that it was “easy”, in one of the most highly educated societies in Europe, to find people willing to murder “those whom their rulers defined as state enemies, without employing duress.” (Read entire article.)

More from Joshua Snyder, HERE. Share

Return to the Tuileries

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte de France, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, returned to  the Tuileries palace in 1814 after a long exile. (From Vive la Reine.) 

 “She is positively haunted by phantoms at the Tuileries,” continued Madame de Boigne.  “Every room holds some troubling memory. Madame weeps and weeps...and yet she ransacks the palace for mementos of her childhood. She sent for the old piano tuner, Monsieur Dubois, to ask what had become of her pianoforte.  He tried in vain to convince her of the superiority of the pianofortes left there by Empress Marie-Louise, but no, Madame wanted her own, which she had played as a girl.” 

~from Madame Royale by Elena Maria Vidal

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Due Process

How certain American citizens have long been denied their most basic civil rights.

It is Roe v Wade not NDAA that stripped away the protections of the Constitution from some Americans by allowing someone to deprive them of life without due process. Once you have created categories of people who are subject to arbitrary killing, how difficult is it to create categories of people who are subject to arbitrary arrest? Apparently it is very easy. Like Douglas Macgregor said, “Whenever you suspend due process, which in effect suspends the rule of law, you walk down a very dangerous path.” Well, we have not had the rule of law in this country since January 22, 1973, because that is when it was decided that due process could be suspended and some persons arbitrarily killed. (Read entire post.)

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Le Roi at le fermier

An opera beloved by Marie-Antoinette makes a stunning comeback.

“Le Roi,” which had its premiere in 1762 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, has been lovingly resurrected by Opera Lafayette, a Washington period-instrument group that specializes in obscure 18th-century French repertory. It opened in Washington recently and was staged at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Thursday evening on its way to the Opéra Royal de Versailles next month. 

The work is based on Robert Dodsley’s “King and the Miller of Mansfield,” a tale of how the king of England loses his hunting party in Sherwood Forest. In “Le Roi” Richard, the young gamekeeper, loves Jenny, the shepherdess (the role played by Marie Antoinette at Versailles), who is abducted but resists the advances of the lascivious Lord Lurewel. Meanwhile the King wanders incognito among the peasants, learning that royalty should listen to their subjects more often. (Read entire post.)

More HERE and HERE.

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Class: Complexity and Abstraction

Fr. Blake in the UK comments on modern problems with catechesis.

There seems to be a growing gulf between what the theological elite (of either complexion) believe and what the man (or woman) in the pew believes. Survey after survey shows those in the pew do not believe what those in the sanctuary believe or are supposed to believe.

It strikes me again and again that the faith has become increasingly more complicated and most people are lost in its complexity and find the Churches teaching complicated and quite unrelated to real life....Perhaps one of our chief difficulties is the failure to give clear teaching or to make a practice of  teaching in a way that is ambiguous. (Read entire post.)

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