GoSale.com :: Reviews by A18R70S9LGIL9T

Reviews Written By: A18R70S9LGIL9T

provided by Amazon.com


	Dark Victory
	"The Victory is Assured"	2009-10-01
I'm watching this for the first time and I know it is a well-deserved classic film. Kitsch-fest according to Pauline Kael, I think it is actually the best pre-war propaganda film ever made. What subliminal stuff! It's released in 1939. Staged among the smart set on Long Island, in the usual way those enviable plutocrats were put before a Depression-ravaged public so that they could live vicariously in great houses and nightclubs while sitting in the darkened theatre. But here (and perhaps this is where "kitsch" may be said to come into it), the rich girl is very ill, more ill than any of the (mostly poorer) audience is likely to be in a lifetime. She is doomed. She has to change her attitude to one of hope, in the face of mortality. When this film was released, my father was a teenager on Long Island, waiting for what he knew was an eventual involvement of the US in the European war. Not as rich as Judith (the warrior princess) Traherne (Bette Davis), but secure, and from the stock which had originally settled the place, the Puritans from whom Judith confessed to have sprung (all the while resenting their inhibiting influence on her sex life). The tumor in her head is once partly excised (The War to End All Wars didn't quite put Europe into the shape it was supposed to), but it is coming back and it is going to blind her (and we are going to go to another war) and her social life is definitely going to be upended. Victory may be dark, but it is victory if you can face death without flinching. Ronald Reagan is in it too, playing Mr. Sang Froid (he will later quip in real life with the doctors who saved him from an assassin's bullet). This is about the quiet before the storm. But all the classes are united. "Where is peace?" Judith asks. Peace is within you, because it sure as heck isn't in the world or in the body itself, so prone to betrayal. Maybe the Puritans had something there. Recurrent wars and recurrent tumors, are just part of the fallen world. The people of spirit stand up to it. (Her doctor husband says, "We just pretend that nothing is going to happen", but the fact that this is said so explicitly, means that the fiction is understood by all parties as such). The script is full of all these allusions to how people were feeling, as peace was on its last legs. Many who watched the film were as doomed as the heroine, with just as many years of future survival to expect. There's a song in it about time and how fleeting it is. Judith sings along. "It is a victory (over the dark) because we're not afraid." The sick wife sends her doctor husband off to fight the foe of cancer, knowing he will never see her again. She plants the hyacinths so that in the spring, when she is dead, they will return (in Greek legend, they spring from the blood of a dying hero). "Give them champagne and be gay. Be very, very gay." When they celebrate the victory which is assured. I am sure this is not the conventional view of the film, which is generally treated as a vehicle for Ms. Davis, who acquired it as such. But if you put on the spectacles of the people who lived when it was made, there is another interpretation which may in fact be valid too. Dah-Dah-Dah-DAH!
	Dark Victory
	"The Victory is Assured"	2009-10-01
I'm watching this for the first time and I know it is a well-deserved classic film. Kitsch-fest according to Pauline Kael, I think it is actually the best pre-war propaganda film ever made. What subliminal stuff! It's released in 1939. Staged among the smart set on Long Island, in the usual way those enviable plutocrats were put before a Depression-ravaged public so that they could live vicariously in great houses and nightclubs while sitting in the darkened theatre. But here (and perhaps this is where "kitsch" may be said to come into it), the rich girl is very ill, more ill than any of the (mostly poorer) audience is likely to be in a lifetime. She is doomed. She has to change her attitude to one of hope, in the face of mortality. When this film was released, my father was a teenager on Long Island, waiting for what he knew was an eventual involvement of the US in the European war. Not as rich as Judith (the warrior princess) Traherne (Bette Davis), but secure, and from the stock which had originally settled the place, the Puritans from whom Judith confessed to have sprung (all the while resenting their inhibiting influence on her sex life). The tumor in her head is once partly excised (The War to End All Wars didn't quite put Europe into the shape it was supposed to), but it is coming back and it is going to blind her (and we are going to go to another war) and her social life is definitely going to be upended. Victory may be dark, but it is victory if you can face death without flinching. Ronald Reagan is in it too, playing Mr. Sang Froid (he will later quip in real life with the doctors who saved him from an assassin's bullet). This is about the quiet before the storm. But all the classes are united. "Where is peace?" Judith asks. Peace is within you, because it sure as heck isn't in the world or in the body itself, so prone to betrayal. Maybe the Puritans had something there. Recurrent wars and recurrent tumors, are just part of the fallen world. The people of spirit stand up to it. (Her doctor husband says, "We just pretend that nothing is going to happen", but the fact that this is said so explicitly, means that the fiction is understood by all parties as such). The script is full of all these allusions to how people were feeling, as peace was on its last legs. Many who watched the film were as doomed as the heroine, with just as many years of future survival to expect. There's a song in it about time and how fleeting it is. Judith sings along. "It is a victory (over the dark) because we're not afraid." The sick wife sends her doctor husband off to fight the foe of cancer, knowing he will never see her again. She plants the hyacinths so that in the spring, when she is dead, they will return (in Greek legend, they spring from the blood of a dying hero). "Give them champagne and be gay. Be very, very gay." When they celebrate the victory which is assured. I am sure this is not the conventional view of the film, which is generally treated as a vehicle for Ms. Davis, who acquired it as such. But if you put on the spectacles of the people who lived when it was made, there is another interpretation which may in fact be valid too. Dah-Dah-Dah-DAH!
	Dark Victory
	"The Victory is Assured"	2009-10-01
I'm watching this for the first time and I know it is a well-deserved classic film. Kitsch-fest according to Pauline Kael, I think it is actually the best pre-war propaganda film ever made. What subliminal stuff! It's released in 1939. Staged among the smart set on Long Island, in the usual way those enviable plutocrats were put before a Depression-ravaged public so that they could live vicariously in great houses and nightclubs while sitting in the darkened theatre. But here (and perhaps this is where "kitsch" may be said to come into it), the rich girl is very ill, more ill than any of the (mostly poorer) audience is likely to be in a lifetime. She is doomed. She has to change her attitude to one of hope, in the face of mortality. When this film was released, my father was a teenager on Long Island, waiting for what he knew was an eventual involvement of the US in the European war. Not as rich as Judith (the warrior princess) Traherne (Bette Davis), but secure, and from the stock which had originally settled the place, the Puritans from whom Judith confessed to have sprung (all the while resenting their inhibiting influence on her sex life). The tumor in her head is once partly excised (The War to End All Wars didn't quite put Europe into the shape it was supposed to), but it is coming back and it is going to blind her (and we are going to go to another war) and her social life is definitely going to be upended. Victory may be dark, but it is victory if you can face death without flinching. Ronald Reagan is in it too, playing Mr. Sang Froid (he will later quip in real life with the doctors who saved him from an assassin's bullet). This is about the quiet before the storm. But all the classes are united. "Where is peace?" Judith asks. Peace is within you, because it sure as heck isn't in the world or in the body itself, so prone to betrayal. Maybe the Puritans had something there. Recurrent wars and recurrent tumors, are just part of the fallen world. The people of spirit stand up to it. (Her doctor husband says, "We just pretend that nothing is going to happen", but the fact that this is said so explicitly, means that the fiction is understood by all parties as such). The script is full of all these allusions to how people were feeling, as peace was on its last legs. Many who watched the film were as doomed as the heroine, with just as many years of future survival to expect. There's a song in it about time and how fleeting it is. Judith sings along. "It is a victory (over the dark) because we're not afraid." The sick wife sends her doctor husband off to fight the foe of cancer, knowing he will never see her again. She plants the hyacinths so that in the spring, when she is dead, they will return (in Greek legend, they spring from the blood of a dying hero). "Give them champagne and be gay. Be very, very gay." When they celebrate the victory which is assured. I am sure this is not the conventional view of the film, which is generally treated as a vehicle for Ms. Davis, who acquired it as such. But if you put on the spectacles of the people who lived when it was made, there is another interpretation which may in fact be valid too. Dah-Dah-Dah-DAH!
	Dark Victory
	"The Victory is Assured"	2009-10-01
I'm watching this for the first time and I know it is a well-deserved classic film. Kitsch-fest according to Pauline Kael, I think it is actually the best pre-war propaganda film ever made. What subliminal stuff! It's released in 1939. Staged among the smart set on Long Island, in the usual way those enviable plutocrats were put before a Depression-ravaged public so that they could live vicariously in great houses and nightclubs while sitting in the darkened theatre. But here (and perhaps this is where "kitsch" may be said to come into it), the rich girl is very ill, more ill than any of the (mostly poorer) audience is likely to be in a lifetime. She is doomed. She has to change her attitude to one of hope, in the face of mortality. When this film was released, my father was a teenager on Long Island, waiting for what he knew was an eventual involvement of the US in the European war. Not as rich as Judith (the warrior princess) Traherne (Bette Davis), but secure, and from the stock which had originally settled the place, the Puritans from whom Judith confessed to have sprung (all the while resenting their inhibiting influence on her sex life). The tumor in her head is once partly excised (The War to End All Wars didn't quite put Europe into the shape it was supposed to), but it is coming back and it is going to blind her (and we are going to go to another war) and her social life is definitely going to be upended. Victory may be dark, but it is victory if you can face death without flinching. Ronald Reagan is in it too, playing Mr. Sang Froid (he will later quip in real life with the doctors who saved him from an assassin's bullet). This is about the quiet before the storm. But all the classes are united. "Where is peace?" Judith asks. Peace is within you, because it sure as heck isn't in the world or in the body itself, so prone to betrayal. Maybe the Puritans had something there. Recurrent wars and recurrent tumors, are just part of the fallen world. The people of spirit stand up to it. (Her doctor husband says, "We just pretend that nothing is going to happen", but the fact that this is said so explicitly, means that the fiction is understood by all parties as such). The script is full of all these allusions to how people were feeling, as peace was on its last legs. Many who watched the film were as doomed as the heroine, with just as many years of future survival to expect. There's a song in it about time and how fleeting it is. Judith sings along. "It is a victory (over the dark) because we're not afraid." The sick wife sends her doctor husband off to fight the foe of cancer, knowing he will never see her again. She plants the hyacinths so that in the spring, when she is dead, they will return (in Greek legend, they spring from the blood of a dying hero). "Give them champagne and be gay. Be very, very gay." When they celebrate the victory which is assured. I am sure this is not the conventional view of the film, which is generally treated as a vehicle for Ms. Davis, who acquired it as such. But if you put on the spectacles of the people who lived when it was made, there is another interpretation which may in fact be valid too. Dah-Dah-Dah-DAH!
	The American Heritage Children's Thesaurus
	"Clear concise for the younger elementary set"	2009-02-24
We purchased the American Heritage Dictionary for a class of second-graders, and this thesaurus is a great supplement. It offers a clear explanation at the beginning of the book of its use. Each entry word is followed by the italicized part of speech under which it is classified, followed by a sentence using the word. You are then offered usually a small list of synonyms. There are boxes on the pages, pretty much at random, which give word groups relating to some subject area (a hotel, for instance). Everything is geared towards elementary comprehension, without being dumbed down. If I were offering a thesaurus to a middle school child, I might tend to reach for either a more advanced version by American Heritage, or the excellent American Education Publishing's Children's Thesaurus. But the most important thing is to give the child the opportunity to find the right word and to learn that the verbal toolbox can be as precise as one which tunes a rocket engine.
	The American Heritage Children's Thesaurus
	"Clear concise for the younger elementary set"	2009-02-24
We purchased the American Heritage Dictionary for a class of second-graders, and this thesaurus is a great supplement. It offers a clear explanation at the beginning of the book of its use. Each entry word is followed by the italicized part of speech under which it is classified, followed by a sentence using the word. You are then offered usually a small list of synonyms. There are boxes on the pages, pretty much at random, which give word groups relating to some subject area (a hotel, for instance). Everything is geared towards elementary comprehension, without being dumbed down. If I were offering a thesaurus to a middle school child, I might tend to reach for either a more advanced version by American Heritage, or the excellent American Education Publishing's Children's Thesaurus. But the most important thing is to give the child the opportunity to find the right word and to learn that the verbal toolbox can be as precise as one which tunes a rocket engine.