'The Awakening' & 'Anna Karenina'

I've said this before, but Chopin gets Edna to the same place Tolstoy gets Anna in a 10th of the time.

Edna and Anna are merely two tiles in the great mosaic of morose women in literature. From Emma Bovary to the Little Women and all the heroines of Austin and the Bronte sisters, the legacy is deep and impactful.

As much as we could celebrate these great characters -- angry, disenfranchises, unsatisfied and sad -- the larger picture here is that women perhaps were not enslaved but the intentions were just the same.

Life prospects were slim, they were kept tethered to the idea that your worth was tied to whoever was married to you. That contentment was the ceiling, and shame and uncertainty were the bottom of the ocean.

Edna chose the bottom of the ocean. Anna, a train.

'The Diaries of Jane Somers'

Doris Lessing was a badass six ways to Sunday. 

She was born in Iran (back in the good ol' days when it was referred to as Persia) in 1919 and later moved to Rhodesia before striking out on her own. She got a late start in writing. She started in the 1950s and went well into the next century including the novels The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could ... which were combined as The Diaries of Jane Somers. 

Lessing, though, was brave. Early on she made her socialist views very public, and even moved to London and abandoned some children along the way with their fathers. She protested nuclear weapons and apartheid, which got her blocked from visiting South Africa and Rhodesia. She later left the communist party after the USSR invaded Hungary and was critical of the war in Afghanistan. The British government spied on her and released their dossier years later. She had to have been doing something right. 

Lessing had been grocery shopping when it was announced that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. 

'Nine Tailors' & 'Murder Must Advertise'

Are we doing this again? 

Are we back in the saddle? 

Truth is, it never really stopped. 

'Tokyo Olympiad'

It’s a bit of poetry that the two state-sanctioned documentary films about the Olympics came with Leni Riefensthal’s bombastic Olympia chronicling the 1936 Berlin games and Kon Ichikawa’s film about the 1964 Tokyo games.

The former showed power and force: Germany on the brink of turning the world on its head. It’s manipulative and in concert with the Nazis’ ideas about pomp, circumstance and a good show.

The later caught back up with the Axis powers. Decimated by years of war, the sons and fathers in graves and countries on the brink, Tokyo, by 1964, was on its own brink: From being a financial and cultural stalwart of the east and certainly a world power under very different circumstances.

Japan had pegged famed director Akira Kurosawa for the task. He proved unamenable to suggestion and – being that he was undoubtedly popular – was his own power. So Japan sacked him and hired Kon Ichikawa. He does a beautiful job of focusing less on the medal stands and tote boards, and more on the triumph of the will (so to speak) of the athletes and the stories behind the world’s best.

'Me and My Girl'

One of the few films on the 1,001 list that unintentionally flopped at the box office. By the mid-30s, Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett were well into their acting careers, but neither had tipped the scales.

There’s no real gargantuan impact on the film industry here. Raoul Walsh directed and other than being prolific as a director, his greatest hits include portraying John Wilkes Booth in Birth of a Nation and discovering John Wayne.

The film is nice and easy, though. Just 79, it flies through witty dialogue and a pretty entertaining, but simple plot. If for no other reason, revel in the glory that is Spencer Tracy in a comedic role.

'Letter From an Unknown Woman'

Notable only because it was directed by Max Ophüls, a German Jew who fled his homeland in 1933 as the Nazis started rattling the cage. He fled again, this time from France, in 1938 and finally landing in the United States. Letter from an Unknown Woman was the second of Ophüls’ Hollywood productions, one of four he completed in the United States before going back to France to finish his life.

Before Letter from an Unknown Woman, Ophüls’ was fired from the film Vendetta by Howard Hughes for either being a foreigner in Hollywood or his slow shooting pace. Or both. This firing came after four years of waiting to get a shot in the United States.

After returning to France in 1950, he never did another Hollywood film. And after leaving, he never filmed in Germany.

'Cocaine Nights'

Part detective novel and part dystopian 1984, you keep waiting for Cocaine Nights to turn the corner. With all the secrets and all the mystery, the wizard is behind the curtain pulling all the levers. Then you get to the final 10 pages and realize there is no wizard, no curtain and no levers. There’s no resolution. There’s no real end. Characters and plots are interchangeable and the book could go on forever, but why tell the same story over again? It all sort of makes you depressed.