Mogambo (1953)

Eloise Kelly: [to Linda Nordley] Remember, I came here to be your friend. For your sake. And I'm keeping the offer open... It'll be rugged, but I'll keep it open.~from Mogambo (1953)

Director John Ford departed from his usual western adventures to film a story set in Africa, involving conflicting passions during a safari expedition. Mogambo is a technicolor remake of Red Dust (1932) which also starred Clark Gable, but had a South East Asian backdrop. In Mogambo, Gable plays Victor Marswell, a big game hunter who is hired by naive scientist Donald Nordley to help him research African wildlife. Donald's prim wife, Linda Nordley (Grace Kelly) feels quite secure in her virtue and therefore is unprepared for the test which lies ahead. Grace possessed the perfect amount of stiffness to make a credible Linda Nordley, who when she falls, falls hard.

On the other hand, Ava Gardner's combination of easy charm and vulnerability made her well-suited for the role of Eloise Kelly, the fast-living, wandering party girl who also is smitten by Victor. Eloise is the fallen woman who seeks and finds redemption, and through her own redemption she is able to rescue the other characters from their entanglements. While on safari she encounters a priest and goes to confession, which is the catalyst for the gradual reformation of her character. Eloise tries to save Linda from Victor's clutches but Linda is too proud to listen to her warning.

The only thing that is annoying about the film is how the clips of wildlife were spliced onto the footage. According to The Stop Button:

The film...mixes naturally-lighted footage of gorillas with the actors on a set. It doesn’t work at all; there’s no energy in the gorilla shots and so Ford gives no energy to the cut-away shots of the actors. Worse, even when there aren’t gorillas around, studio shots mix in with location footage, removing the Hollywood realism aura–awkward as it was–the film created for ninety-five minutes. The film worked its best in the first half, before the location-filled safari....

In spite of the faulty technology which replaced on-location shots, Mogambo is a movie worth seeing, for the human drama that simmers along, punctuated with clever dialog and plenty of action. John Ford usually worked Catholic spirituality into his films, showing how God works in mysterious ways, with unlikely people, seeking out the lost.
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Quinquagesima Sunday

It is Quinquagesima Sunday. According to New Advent:

The period of fifty days before Easter. It begins with the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, called Dominica in Quinquagesima....

For many early Christians it was the beginning of the fast before Easter....For some, Quinquagesima marked the time after which meat was forbidden....In many places this Sunday after and the next two days were used to prepare for Lent by a good confession; hence in England we find the names Shrove Sunday and Shrovetide.

As the days before Lent were frequently spent in merry-making, Benedict XIV by the Constitution "Inter Cetera" (1 Jan., 1748) introduced a kind of Forty Hours' Devotion to keep the faithful from dangerous amusements and to make some reparation for sins committed.

In the words of Dom Gueranger for Quinquagesima Sunday:

We are commanded to use this world as if we used it not; to have an abiding conviction of our not having here a lasting city, and of the misery and danger we incur when we forget that death is one day to separate us from everything we possess in this life.
~from Abbot Gueranger's The Liturgical Year, Vol. IV

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Pornography and Deicide

Robert R. Reilly explores the connections between pornography, murder, and social disorder. To quote:

Pornography has been deliberately used as a social and political dissolvent during periods of revolutionary change. To prepare for the French Revolution, the radical Jacobins flooded Paris with pornography. Who would know the politics of pornography better than that greatest of pornographers, the Marquis de Sade? De Sade desired to indulge his sexual passions without moral restraint and saw clearly what that ultimately meant. In The Philosophy of the Boudoir, de Sade wrote that the murder of King Louis XVI was insufficient to bring about the desired revolutionary freedom. The morality of the social and political order had survived the King's beheading. How could it finally be destroyed? In the first known use of the phrase, de Sade wrote that the murder of the King must be followed by the "murder of God." Only when the morality represented by Divine Kingship was abolished could man express himself in the fullness of pornographic existence. This would include, after regicide and deicide, homicide. De Sade perceived and approvingly depicted in his works the inexorable logic of pornography: sex outside of the moral order ultimately leads to murder and death. The Marquis would not be surprised by the FBI study on homicide that found that pornography is the most common interest among serial killers. As one convicted murderer and child molester told the Meese Commission: "[Pornography's] effect on me was devastating. I lost all sense of decency and respect for human life."

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Killer Robots

Star Wars is getting a bit too close for comfort. (Via Platonic Shift)

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research .

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.

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Midwifery in the Deep South

Linda has a series of posts on Mrs. Maude Callen, a registered nurse who ministered to the health needs of the rural poor in South Carolina in the early 1950's. Mrs. Callen delivered babies in quite primitive conditions, which is how much of the world was born until modern times. In many places, such conditions still exist. Share

Blood from a Stone

John Zmirak on Fr. Maciel and the great deception. Share

Dick Whittington and His Cat

Poor Whittington was severely beaten at home by his tyrannical mistress the cook, who used him so cruelly, and made such game of him for sending his cat to sea, that at last the poor boy determined to run away from his place.... He traveled as far as Holloway, and there sat down on a stone to consider what course he should take; but while he was thus ruminating, Bow bells, of which there were only six, began to ring; and he thought their sounds addressed him in this manner:"Turn again, Whittington, Thrice Lord Mayor of London."

"Lord Mayor of London!" said he to himself, "what would not one endure to be Lord Mayor of London..!" So home he went....
~from "Dick Whittington and His Cat"

We had a beautifully illustrated storybook about Master Whittington and his cat that was read to us often as children. Something about the story stayed with me. I suppose that the image of Dick Whittington the scullery boy, beaten, starving, cold and hopeless, was one that could be easily conjured up in bleak moments of existence, along with the words chimed by the Bow bells: "Turn again, Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London." Unlike other fairy tales, the idyll does not have its roots in classical or medieval legends, but in the life of one Richard Whittington (c.1354–1423), four times elected Lord Mayor of London. Whittington rose from the mercer's guild to become one of the wealthiest merchants in England, famous for his charities, some of which exist to the present day. The existence of the cat which he sold to the rodent infested land of Barbary is bit dubious, although a small statue of it still exists on Highgate Hill in London. What strikes me now about the tale is that it shows that it was possible for people to rise socially as well as financially in feudal times, contrary to the popular image of an intransigent class system. What is more, Whittington was considered a great man by his contemporaries not merely because of his wealth and political power but because of the generous use he made of what he had received.


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Requiem for the West

British journalist John Laughland describes a visit to the cathedral in Orléans, France.

Recently I visited Orléans cathedral. It is one of the largest cathedrals in a country of huge ones, a magnificent late Gothic construction whose interior soars more dramatically than the heavier interiors of Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris. Orléans is also one of the most dramatic towns in French history, the site of the greatest battle of the Hundred Years War when Joan of Arc, “the Maid of Orléans”, defeated the English and thereby ensured the liberation of her country from the foreign invader.

I have had few sadder disappointments than when I entered the cathedral. Not the architecture, to be sure, which is magnificent, but the ambience. It was like entering a morgue. There was not a soul to be seen. No clerics bustled about; no women arranged flowers; no one came and went to choir practice. There was certainly no Mass in progress or even, it seemed, in prospect. The side-altars had evidently not been used for decades. The magnificent Gothic revival confessionals gathered dust silently in the cold. The only sounds came from the rainwater which leaked copiously through the roof to form an enormous puddle by one of the columns, and the ridiculous sound of a CD playing, round and round, Verdi’s requiem. It was like a scene from a cheap movie in which frightened travellers stumble across a recently abandoned house, but it was frighteningly easy to imagine the cathedral, a few decades hence, completely ruined as so many cathedrals and former abbeys are elsewhere in Europe.

The choice of the requiem was, of course, sinisterly apt. The cathedral is its present state is nothing but a magnificent mausoleum to a dead Christian culture – with the only difference that, in modern mausoleum’s like that of Lenin and Atatürk, the dead man inside is venerated for his political action to this day. By contrast, the Christian culture of Europe has died not with a bang but a whimper.

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The Neighborhood Dive

Charles Coulombe remarks upon the fascinating social life that can be found in small, neighborhood taverns, "where everybody knows your name." Even as a university student, I could never stand trendy bars with a huge cover charge, where the music was so loud that conversation was rendered impossible. Unfortunately, such pretentious places abound in university towns. To this day, my husband and I enjoy a little pizza pub in Bellefonte called The Hofbrau, less than a block from our parish church. We often go there with friends after the Miraculous Medal novena on Monday nights. Although the decor has not changed much since the early 1940's, as I have been informed by certain inhabitants of Bellefonte, the food is good, simple tavern fare. As in many old Pennsylvania taverns, there are two entrances, one which leads directly into the bar, which in former times was only for men. The main entrance opens into the "dining area" to be used by ladies and families. The Hofbrau is a great place to talk for hours, solving the problems of the world. Share