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Archive | October, 2009

The Tragic Rand

By on October 16, 2009 7

Will Wilkinson has a good anti-conflationist piece on Rand, here. (CHT Charles Johnson.) I posted the following quibble:

Excellent piece (and on related points see also my posts Ayn Rand’s Left-Libertarian Legacy and Ayn Rand and the Capitalist Class); but I think I disagree with you about the benevolent-universe premise; when she says that success is metaphysically normal, I don’t think she means this to entail that success (or even the possibility of success) is statistically normal. Admittedly I think she perhaps sometimes slides from the former to the latter in her later writings (as in her changing views on charity); but if so, that was a mistaken inference and doesn’t impugn the principle itself. By analogy (to make a Michael Thompson-y point): even if some plague caused most lions to be born with three legs, it would still be true that the lion is a four-legged animal or that being four-legged is normal for lions.

Living Dangerously

By on October 13, 2009 3

Check out this amazing video of a gibbon fearlessly teasing two tigers. Admittedly they’re quite young tigers – but still, they’re not itty bitty cubs or anything; they definitely surpass their tormentor in fangs, claws, and sheer mass. But in speed and agility – not so much.

More than anything, I was reminded of ERB’s stories of Tarzan’s boyhood (in books 1 and 6), where the young apeboy was always portrayed as doing this kind of thing.

Hugo Mexicano

By on October 11, 2009 2

Ayn Rand always preferred stories in which the main conflict is between noble and heroic figures (though one or both may be tragically misguided) rather than between heroes and villains; this is one of many things she liked about Victor Hugo, whose works evince the same preference. I was reminded of this last night on TCM when I caught the 1939 film Juarez, which I greatly enjoyed. (Amazon seems to have it only in vhs; another outfit offers it in dvd, but I suspect the recording may be of inferior quality.)

Juarez and Lincoln (top); Carlota and Maximilian (bottom)

Juarez and Lincoln (top); Carlota and Maximilian (bottom)

The film officially stars Paul Muni as Mexican president Benito Juárez (so I guess Tom Russell was wrong) and Bette Davis as Empress Carlota, but despite both billing and title, the actual lead is Brian Aherne, doing a terrific and subtle job as the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian. (We also see Claude Rains as a somewhat too forceful Napoléon III, and John Garfield as a much too likable Porfirio Díaz.)

In Rand’s introduction (reprinted in The Romantic Manfesto) to Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three, she praises Hugo for portraying the two chief anatagonists – the monarchist leader Lantenac and the republican leader Cimourdain – as equals in “spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication,” even while deploring the weakness and vacuity of the political arguments Hugo has his characters make on behalf of their respective ideologies. In both these respects Juarez is remarkably Hugoesque.

The two chief antagonists, Maximilian the fey otherworldly idealist and Juárez the canny Yoda-like enigma, couldn’t be more different (Misesian alert: one is a Habsburg who regards monarchy as the best guarantor of individual liberty, while the other is a democrat who worshipfully carries around an icon of, and dresses to imitate, Abraham Lincoln), but both command our sympathy and respect for their “spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication” (though, unlike in Ninety-Three, we, rather frustratingly, never get to see a personal confrontation between the two). Likewise, Maximilian’s case for the independence of kings from faction is both an historical and a theoretical absurdity, while Juárez’s brief for popular rule confuses individual with collective self-government. But don’t watch the movie for political philosophy, watch it for a clash between two really cool characters.

P.S. – Oh, and here’s a truly awful trailer for the movie (proving, inter alia, that back in 1939 they didn’t know the difference between “flaunt” and “flout” either). The movie really is much better than one would guess from this trailer.

P.P.S. – Some connections: The film’s director, William Dieterle, also directed Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and Rand’s Love Letters, while its top-billed star, Paul Muni, hailed from Mises’s hometown of Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv.

Valli Girl

By on October 8, 2009 5

The 1942 Italian film version of We the Living (Alida Valli, Rossano Brazzi, and Fosco Giachetti) – the best of the Rand movies, and by Rand’s own admission better than the Rand-scripted The Fountainhead – is finally out on dvd, and this version includes some cool extras.

We the Living

First, there’s 45 minutes’s worth of the hour or so of scenes that Rand chose to delete from the authorised version. Some were deleted for ideological reasons (e.g., anticapitalist and antisemitic rants that the fascist authorities insisted on adding to the script) and others for artistic reasons (for example, the film changed Andrei’s death from a suicide to a murder, and Rand changed it back). Still others were subplots that, though not inaccurate to the novel, Rand evidently regarded as distracting from the main plot. (I do wish there were also a version available of the whole movie as originally made.)

Second, there’s a short documentary about the history of the film, the highlight of which is an interview with Massimo Ferrara, general manager of the studio that made the film, and a chief source of the claim that the movie was eventually banned by the same government that had originally authorised it. (R. W. Bradford has questioned the accuracy of Ferrara’s story; the points Bradford raised are worth thinking about, though I don’t find them as compelling as he did.)

There’s also a brief visual clip of a funny Rand letter I don’t recall having read before, where she jokes about having no non-intellectual activities to report.

The copy on the back of the dvd is misleading in one respect; it promises to include “The Original Ending and Why Ayn Rand Changed It.” The original ending is included in the “deleted scenes” feature, but there’s no discussion of why she nixed it. Still, it’s obvious enough once one sees it; the whole point of that scene in the book is what Kira is thinking and feeling, but in the movie you can only see a pale figure in the distance and can barely even tell it’s Kira.

Some of Rand’s other hard-to-find movies are also available now on dvd, albeit in lower-quality versions that seem to have been copied off tv broadcasts – from the excellent Love Letters (Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones; full script by Rand, albeit adapting someone else’s novel), through the uneven but still worthwhile You Came Along (Robert Cummings and Lizabeth Scott; Rand revising someone else’s script), to the disappointing Night of January 16th (Robert Preston, Ellen Drew, and Nils Asther; a barely recognisable adaptation of Rand’s Broadway play).

In mostly unrelated news (not completely unrelated, since Welles co-starred with We the Living’s Valli and Love Letters’ Cotten in one of my favourite movies, The Third Man, as well as playing a character in Citizen Kane analogous to Raymond Massey’s character in The Fountainhead), I can’t tell whether this movie is any good, but Christian McKay definitely does an impressive job of capturing Orson Welles.

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