Photos from a Visit back home

Dale Wittig,  April 2016
Coventry, Connecticut

Karen Lank & son, Noah

Oak Trail Brook

Kyle Hawes on Footbridge

Joe Sokolowski in daughter's Hospital Room

Louis Haddad in Hospital Bed

Rockville Mill

Corral on Armstrong Road

Snake Hill Road

The Man from Planet X,

Edgar Ulmer, 1951
Hollywood, California

Sixty five years ago today Edgar G Ulmer’s great cheap science fiction movie was first released.  The atmosphere, tone and design of this film are pretty near perfection. The man from Planet X, the character, is unknowable and this extends to the man who inhabited this severe and wondrously phony costume.  His name isn’t even listed in the credits and there are conflicting accounts of who he was.  (One source identifies him as the not unknown Pat Goldin.)   For its resourceful and poetic use of movie fog it deserves to stand beside Jack Smith’s I was a Male Yvonne de Carlo

Ten Worthy Film Adaptations of Shakespeare Plays

1 the Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Christine Edzard 

2 Othello, Orson Welles  

3 Macbeth, Roman Polanski  

4 King Lear, Grigori Kozintsev  

5 The Tempest, Derek Jarman  

6 Hamlet, Michael Almereyda  

7 Richard III, Laurence Olivier  

8 As You Like it, Paul Czinner  

9 Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli  

10 Cymbeline, Elijah Moshinksky

Here there are two limitations I set myself that made this list doubly difficult: no play could be cited twice, as well as, again, no film maker could appear more than once.  Though Kurosawa is among my favorite film makers and he has based at least three films on plays by Shakespeare, none of them are faithful to the original text.   Kozintsev’s King Lear, on the other hand, follows a faithful translation by Boris Pasternak.  There may well be other, even better, foreign language adaptations of Shakespeare, but I haven’t seen them.  I’ve seen most of those that have been done in English.