Author: Keith Humphreys

Categories
Mystery/Noir

Twilight

My name is Harry Ross, and here’s the way my life has gone: First I was a cop and then a private detective. And then…a drunk. Also, in there somewhere, a husband and a father. You’d think with all that, the world would lose its power to seduce. But you’d be wrong.

So intones Paul Newman’s character in this week’s movie recommendation, the deliberately old fashioned 1998 film noir Twilight directed and co-written by the estimable Robert Benton. The film centers on a wealthy Hollywood family comprising former movie stars Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon) and their teenage daughter Mel (Reese Witherspoon).

Let me pause to note that two sentences into this recommendation and I have already mentioned 5 Academy Award winners!

The plot: After a disastrous effort to take Mel away from a stupid, sleazy paramour (Liev Schreiber), Harry was injured and moved in with the Ames family. He has long since recovered, but sticks around ostensibly because Jack has been diagnosed with cancer. But the truth is he is desperately in love with Catherine. Jack sends him on a mission to pay off someone whom Harry suspects is blackmailing the couple. He cares about both of them, even if he doesn’t completely trust them, so he returns reluctantly to private detective work. Thus begins a tortuous mystery involving murder, betrayal and long-buried secrets.

Though intentionally packed with many 1940s noir elements, the film from another point of view is a twist on the old detective stories in that the classic private investigator (e.g., in The Big Sleep) was an outside critic of his rich and powerful clients, less wealthy but with better judgment and morals. Here, Harry Ross is not much more than a pet, living on the estate of his benefactors, doing menial work and longing for Catherine’s love when he is in fact (as Mel puts it) a bit player in a movie starring other people.

The unmatched cast also includes James Garner, Stockard Channing, Margo Martindale, John Spencer and M. Emmet Walsh (In a vivid part given that he doesn’t even say a word!). Directing such a seasoned and talented group must have been a pleasure for Benton, who clearly has respect for the genre. He also contributed a script with sharp dialogue as well as some well-timed funny lines. Many of the scenes recall either specific 1940s detective films or at least their general style. If that isn’t Old Hollywood enough for you, the Ames house was once the home of Dolores Del Rio and Cedric Gibbons.

Reese Witherspoon and Liev Schreiber were cast I assume in the hopes of bringing in some younger viewers, and perhaps as well for their sex scene, but they bring much more than that to the table. Both are strong performers who pass my newbie test of screen greatness: They are completely at ease in scenes with the established superstars around them.

The only thing that clanged for me in this movie was the introduction about 35 minutes in of a comic sidekick played by Giancarlo Esposito. His character just doesn’t fit the mood of the rest of the picture, and his scenes are the one part of the film where things drag a bit. Other than that, this is for me irresistible viewing and I find it mysterious that it was not a hit with audiences when it was released. I suspect it underperformed because it was aimed at an older audience in an era when said audience did not buy many movie tickets (As the Boomers age, films like this have done better box office, which is fantastic if like me you enjoy films that are aimed at someone other than teenagers and adults who think like teenagers).

Categories
Documentaries and Books

The Kid Stays in the Picture

In Vincente Minnelli’s brilliant The Bad and the Beautiful, Kirk Douglas gives one of his best performances as Hollywood Producer Jonathan Shields. Shields is self-destructive, ruthless and a user of people, yet he is also so talented and understands film so well that everyone in Hollywood wants to work with him anyway. I thought of Shields frequently as I watched the absolutely mesmerizing 2002 documentary about Robert Evans: The Kid Stays in the Picture.

This is MUST viewing for film buffs, as the raconteur/rascal/genius recounts his unique career from his discovery by Norma Shearer to his failed acting career to his shockingly successful transformation into a producer, to disaster, to saving Paramount, to more disaster, and to a late-life return to the business. Evans knew everybody (Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, and on and on) and may understand Hollywood as well as anyone.

You do not have to believe Evans is a factually reliable narrator to enjoy this film. He was clearly born to seduce other people, as his seven ex-wives could attest, and his stories glow from the luster of repeated tellings. But his love of cinema and his deep knowledge of stars and studios are unmistakable. There is also a great deal of humor in the movie, including a hilarious extended parody of Evans by Dustin Hoffman, who later went even further in that vein in Wag the Dog.

The other impressive thing about this documentary is that Producer/Co-Director Nanette Burnstein and her team created a kinetic, eye-catching film despite working heavily from still photos and old clips. The arresting look of this movie is almost as captivating as the content.

Categories
Action/Adventure Horror/Suspense Science Fiction / Fantasy

Night Slaves and The Screaming Woman **Double Feature**

ABC MOVIE OF THE WEEK COLLECTION" - 18 DVDS - COMPLETE UNCUT - TV ...

I generally don’t recommend made-for-TV movies because they generally aren’t worth watching (With some exceptions, such as Stephen King’s It). But there was a quality series of such films in the 1970s known as the “ABC Movie of the Week”. It gave audiences memorable moments such as Karen Black being stalked by an evil doll in Trilogy of Terror, Elizabeth Montgomery doing some ruthless ax work au naturale in The Legend of Lizzie Borden and Dennis Weaver battling a mysterious truck driver on a lonely road in Duel (An early Spielberg triumph).

I recommend two lesser known but still solid Twilight Zone-esque entries in this series of television movies: Night Slaves and The Screaming Woman.

Night Slaves is based on a novel by Jerry Sohl, a veteran TV writer for Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Outer Limits, among others (including the original Star Trek). Familiar plot elements from those worthy programs are all here: A mysterious isolated location, strange experiences, and a central character who can’t tell if he has stumbled across something bizarre and sinister or in fact is losing his mind.

James Franciscus and Lee Grant play Clay and Marjorie Howard, a toothsome married couple who are taking a vacation from the big city in order to help them recover from a recent trauma. Clay was in a terrible auto accident in which he suffered a head injury and two other people were killed. The Howards chance upon a sleepy little town and take a room for the night. But ’round midnight, Clay wakes up to see all the townspeople gathering in a trance-like state and then leaving town. He looks for Marjorie and finds that she too has become a glassy-eyed zombie. He receives cryptic clues about what is happening from an alluring stranger (Tisha Sterling) but she disappears before he can demand a full explanation. When Clay awakens the next morning, the town is apparently back to normal and everyone thinks his head injury has caused him to hallucinate the events he reports having witnessed. Is he going crazy, or is the town in the grip of some malevolent force of which its people are unaware?

The story unfolds slowly enough to be suspenseful without ever dragging — indeed like all the movies in the ABC series the whole thing runs only about 70 minutes. The actors are all believable and, as in a good Outer Limits episode, the resolution is clever and satisfying.

With made-for-TV flicks, I keep to my “B-movie standard” for cinematic releases, i.e., I don’t expect such movies to be more than they reasonably can be and frankly dislike it when they try. For that reason, the “TV elements” of Night Slaves don’t bother me, e.g., the set is clearly a studio back lot used in a million oaters, the reflected camera lights are visible in the store windows on one of the night shots, and there are some static one camera set ups that would have been replaced with more captivating cinematography if this were a big budget product for the big screen. If you can’t accept those sorts of things, don’t bother with this one. But if you can appreciate a solid TV movie as such, Night Slaves is quality entertainment.

An even better film along similar lines is The Screaming Woman, starring Olivia De Haviland in a role that you could consider a follow-up to The Snake Pit. She plays a wealthy woman named Laura Wynant who has just returned from the sanitarium after a mental breakdown. As she walks the grounds near the remnants of a bulldozed old smokehouse, she thinks she hears a woman calling for help from underneath the ground. As with Night Slaves, The Screaming Woman is based on a terrific writer’s (Ray Bradbury) story that depends on a character convincing other people that what has been witnessed is not an insane fantasy.

It’s pleasant as always to watch Joseph Cotten work (He plays Laura’s attorney) and the visuals of the screaming woman are effectively eerie. And the direction, by the accomplished Jack Smight, gets the most from the script and the actors. Again, it’s a TV movie, but it’s a fine TV movie indeed.

Categories
Comedy

Ruggles of Red Gap (Guest Review)

This film recommendation comes from Dr. Jean O’Reilly, a friend and colleague of mine at the National Addiction Centre at King’s College London. I am indebted to Jean for introducing me to the gut-bustingly funny, wise and sweet film Ruggles of Red Gap, about which she has done serious scholarly work. She can describe the virtues of this 1935 movie gem much better than I can, so let me turn things over to Jean:

Fans of actor Charles Laughton and director Leo McCarey will probably look askance at this choice of film, often regarded as an early, minor success in each man’s career. But it’s a charming film, with Laughton rising to the challenge of a rare comic performance and McCarey settling into the easy style of filmmaking that typified his later career.

Ruggles of Red Gap tells the story of an English gentleman’s gentleman (Laughton) who in 1908 is transported against his will from service in the household of an English earl to the American frontier town of Red Gap, Washington. In his strange new surroundings, Marmaduke Ruggles works as a manservant and dogsbody to the nouveaux riches Egbert and Effie Floud. After living for a time in Red Gap, Ruggles becomes infused with the spirits of democracy and equality and begins to consider abandoning a life of servitude to become his own man.

I love this film because it features, in nascent form, one of the attributes that became a hallmark of McCarey’s mature directorial style: the improvised scene. McCarey’s easygoing, collaborative approach to filmmaking is well documented, including the piano kept on the set for sing-alongs, the jokes and stories he told to lead his cast toward new scenes, and his keen eye for showcasing actors’ skills. He thought nothing of rewriting the shooting script on a whim, or spending a day shooting a new scene that had nothing to do with the storyline but that he thought might surprise viewers. As a result, McCarey’s films tend to be episodic, loosely structured, and peppered with inspired moments not always closely connected to the storyline.

Continue reading “Ruggles of Red Gap (Guest Review)”
Categories
British Drama

Great Expectations

The great director Sir David Lean is remembered mainly for lushly coloured 70mm epics with big international casts, sweeping stories and long running times (e.g., Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago). But he had a fine career before those triumphs during which he made tightly constructed black and white films with British casts, stories and locations. These early Lean films include two excellent Dickens’ adaptations, one of which is the 1946 version of Great Expectations.

The origins of Lean’s adaptation of the oft-filmed novel are visible in another film I recommend: In Which We Serve. Lean was an accomplished film editor when he got a chance to break into directing alongside Noël Coward on that movie. The cinematographer Ronald Neame is the producer of Great Expectations (and likely an influence on Guy Green’s trendsetting camera work). Bernard Miles and John Mills are back as actors, again adroitly playing off each other with emotional impact. Kay Walsh goes from acting to collaborating with Lean on the screenplay (along with Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Cecil McGivern), a masterpiece of economy which relates Dickens’ 500-page novel in just 118 minutes. Walsh went on to star in Lean’s excellent Oliver Twist and in private life to become the second in his series of six wives (imagine the alimony payments!). Alec Guinness was not in In Which We Serve, but Great Expectations, his first sizable film role, began his long-running cinematic partnership with Lean. All of this demonstrates what a small community British film was in its glorious period after the war, and the even smaller nature of the network Lean constructed around his own projects.

Continue reading “Great Expectations”
Categories
Action/Adventure Drama

The Sting (Guest Review)

My friend Johann Koehler of the London School of Economics is a criminologist, an innovative thinker, and a lover of movies. I asked him to contribute a review of one of his favourites, The Sting. Over to Johann:

Fans of Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s pairing in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would have been raring for a cinema ticket in 1973 to see Hollywood’s most bankable leading duo in George Roy Hill’s multiple Academy Award-winning The Sting.

The plot revolves around a desperate revenge story shrouded in fanciful con artist scheme-ery. After the murder of his mentor, Redford’s Johnny Hooker, an impulsive neophyte in the world of confidence schemes, looks to Newman’s Henry Gondorff for instruction and assistance in bringing about the demise of the villainous Doyle Lonnegan (impeccably played by Robert Shaw). Shaw projects the same unpredictable brutality he mastered as Henry VIII in Fred Zinnemann’s 1966 classic A Man for All Seasons and the Newman/Redford team deliver a characteristically heart-warming performance redolent of Butch and Sundance.

While the film has been rebuked for a plot that drags at times, one can’t help feeling eager to find out how the final scene’s con plays out. In truth, the “long con” provides a deeply satisfying ending. In contrast to the “short con”, in which the con artist fleeces the mark for all that he has on his person, the “long con” is a much more deliberate and vicious scheme. It requires that the mark be seduced into the con artist’s deception and to participate in the construction of his own demise. In so doing, he ultimately becomes both the perpetrator as well as the victim. Lonnegan thus becomes either the most unsympathetic villain, or the least, depending on your mood while watching the film.

Scott Joplin’s jolly ragtime music, anachronistically written two decades before The Sting is actually set, imbues the film with enough whimsy to conceal the bitterness of the underlying storyline. And for a master-class in comic acting, be sure to look out for Newman’s show-stealing drunken poker scene on the train.

Closing trivia note from Keith: The money that Rick Blaine gives up to a needy couple using number 22 on a rigged roulette wheel finally gets paid back by Johnny Hooker in this movie.

Categories
Action/Adventure Mystery/Noir

Ellery Queen Mysteries

In a few minutes, this man is going to be murdered. The question is: who killed him? Was it the frustrated nephew? The spurned housekeeper? The fiancé with a shady past? The willful heiress? Or was it someone else? Match wits with Ellery Queen, and see if you can guess who done it!

Oh what rapture when a high-quality, beloved old TV show re-emerges intact in a digitally remastered, commercial-free DVD set! The superlative television series Ellery Queen which ran on NBC from 1975-1976 is now available in a boxed DVD set comprising all 22 episodes plus the pilot and an informative interview with series co-creator William Link.

Link and Richard Levenson are legends in the TV game for their clever plotting, coruscating dialogue and most of all, unforgettable characters. Their formidable talents are on display in every episode of this series, which draws from the Ellery Queen novels they read growing up (they met in high school and became lifelong best friends and collaborators). Gimlet-eyed viewers will catch a few parallels between Queen and the most famous Link and Levenson creation, Lt. Columbo: Ellery doesn’t shoot or punch anyone, his forgetfulness, occasional clumsiness and gee-whiz manner (which were not elements of the books) leads suspects to underestimate him, and he once even says, while walking away from a suspect he has just grilled, “Oh, there’s one more thing…”.

The series adopts a deliberately old fashioned mystery style, with each episode starting with a “This person is about to be murdered” hook and closing with a “let’s gather all the suspects at the scene of the crime to announce who done it” scene. Victims get murdered in locked rooms and leave cryptic dying clues regarding the killer’s identity. Red herrings look suspicious, private eyes are hard-boiled, newspaper men are cynical and damsels are, well, in distress. Yet the writers also added a fresh twist to the old chestnut formulae: Ellery would look directly at the audience just before the closing scene and announce that he had the solution. He would then allude to a few clues from the story so far (occasionally, too many for my taste) and challenge the audience to solve the mystery. This made the show fun, especially once you had seen a few episodes and knew the drill, because you could try to solve the mystery yourself as you watched: All the evidence was right there in front of your eyes.

The heart of the show is Jim Hutton as Ellery and David Wayne as his father, a widowed police inspector. Both men are skilled actors, perfectly cast. If you smiled to see the nuances of the relationship between Rocky and Jim on The Rockford Files, you will be equally warm to the father-son dynamic here. At times they are like a typical father and son, at other times the son acts like the father to his sometimes truculent and self-neglecting dad (this works particularly well because the towering Hutton looks like he could cradle the diminutive Wayne in his arms), but most of the time they are like a couple of clever little boys running around, solving puzzles, doing good and having fun.

The other tremendously enjoyable aspect of the series is the gallery of guest stars, a mix of old time radio/movie icons (e.g., Ray Walston, Don Ameche, Vincent Price, George Burns, Eve Arden, Walter Pidgeon, Donald O’Connor, Dana Andrews) and experienced television character actors (e.g., John Hillerman, Ken Swofford, Tom Bosley, Betty White). It couldn’t have been too hard to direct such seasoned, talented casts, but that said the direction in the series is several cuts above what one usually sees on television (special shout out to Walter Doniger for “The Adventure of the Wary Witness” and David Greene for the pilot).

Production values are also impressive, with swell-looking cars, clothes and interiors from 1940s New York City. Also to love: Elmer Bernstein’s jazzy big band score played over stylish opening credits.

The series was unusual for its consistently high quality, making it hard to pick favourite episodes, but if pressed I would go with “The Adventure of Miss Aggie’s Farewell” because it so well recalls “Our Miss Brooks” (Eve Arden’s old time radio show whose comedy holds up surprisingly well), and “The Adventure of Caesar’s Last Sleep” because its illuminates the relationship between Ellery and his dad.

Ellery Queen Mysteries is irresistible television. May the corporate pillock who cancelled it after one season burn in eternal hellfire.

Categories
Action/Adventure Drama Science Fiction / Fantasy

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Graffiti messages tend to be clichéd, obscene or vapid, but once every few years I get a smile on my face when I see “Klaatu barada nikto!” scrawled on some random bit of fence or wall. It’s a critical line in Robert Wise’s 1951 science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still.

In a decade when countless movies showed the good people of Earth being threatened by evil aliens (e.g., Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, The War of the Worlds) Edmund H. North’s subtle, intelligent screenplay inverted the usual premise. In this case, a flying saucer lands in Washington DC and disgorges a literate, moral, peace-loving and thoughtful alien (Michael Rennie, in his finest hour) who spends most of his movie under siege by petty, violent and backward Earthlings.

The alien, Klaatu, hopes to persuade humanity to renounce war and atomic weaponry, but mankind isn’t ready to agree (This is wistfully conveyed to Klaatu early in the film by Frank Conroy, in an uncredited, quietly powerful performance as an advisor to The POTUS). After an initial brutish encounter with the military, Klaatu escapes and decides he must learn more about humanity if he is going to save it. He adopts the name of Carpenter (ahem) and moves to a rooming house run by a widow and her boy (Patricia Neal and Billy Gray, who are believable and appealing). The two of them give Klaatu’s hope for humanity, leading him to confide in them about his true nature and mission.

The ingenious premise of the script allows this film to be as much social comment as science fiction. As the alien visitor watches human beings interact, tours the graves of Arlington Cemetery and reflects on our greatest president’s words at the Lincoln Memorial, we see ourselves through his sadder and wiser eyes, with profound emotional effect.

The special effects are solid for the period, with the Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced flying saucer being a particular highlight. Yet the effects don’t overwhelm the story or acting as they often have in more recent zillion dollar CGI-laden sci-fi films. Bernard Herrman’s score is also appropriate to the visuals and themes of the movie. All of this is a credit to Robert Wise’s ability to maintain tone throughout a film. To a number of film buffs, Robert Wise is the hack who destroyed The Magnificent Ambersons, a company man who did whatever project he was assigned but had no artistic vision of his own. If you hold to that negative view of Wise, you really should watch this movie, observe how well it is constructed, see how consistently excellent are the performances, and note how efficiently and effectively the story is told. Wise won Oscars for other films, but in my opinion this movie best demonstrates his considerable skills as a film maker.

Here is the cleverly crafted trailer to this masterpiece of science fiction:

p.s. for trivia fans. There’s a scientific errors in the script: Klaatu says he is from 250 million miles away yet knows how to talk like a contemporary American because he has been monitoring Earth’s radio programs on his home planet.

Categories
Action/Adventure British Drama

The Frightened City

In nearly a century on this earth, Herbert Lom had a long and varied acting career. Born in Prague under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he achieved screen immortality as the Chief Inspector whom Clouseau slowly drives mad in the Pink Panther films. But before that did excellent work in many high-quality films, most of which unfortunately are largely forgotten today. I have spotlighted his fine performance as the kindly, devout, ill-fated Gino in Hell Drivers. Lom has a completely different role as a cold, clever and super-smooth criminal mastermind in 1961’s The Frightened City.

The Frightened City is a B-movie which doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. The budget is modest and so are the ambitions. But on those terms it delivers as a solid crime melodrama with a great starring role for Lom and excellent supporting work by a then little known Scottish actor who was only a year away from becoming an international superstar: Sean Connery.

The film is set in the London criminal underworld. A wily financier (Lom, conveying the calm of the truly powerful in every scene) figures out that the six biggest gangs could enhance the revenue of their protection rackets by organising themselves as a syndicate. He convinces one gangster (an agreeably lubricious Alfred Marks) to head the syndicate, who in turn recruits a former burglar (Connery) to be the face of the mob to the shops, pubs and restaurants it extorts. All goes well until the gang falls out, leading to a murder that throws the syndicate into turmoil and gives a dogged Scotland Yard detective inspector (John Gregson) the chance he needs to pounce.

The secondary plotline concerns Yvonne Romain as a luscious, ambitious immigrant singer who catches Connery’s eye. They have great chemistry on screen, and the script does a gratifying job of making her craftier than him rather than portraying her as a brainless tart (funnily enough Romain’s real-life husband went on to write the lyrics of several of Connery’s Bond films, including Goldfinger). The other engaging aspect of the story is Connery’s relationship to his former burglary partner (well-played by Kenneth Griffith), who has been crippled in a fall during an attempted break-in. Connery skillfully conveys the guilt he feels about the accident, and how it drives him into the hands of the new, more violent crew who are running the protection racket.

The film is not without weaknesses. Some of the sets look cheap, probably because they are. The script underdevelops its theme of how crime was changing to become more violent and organised and thereby outpacing long-standing law enforcement tactics. As a result, the scenes with the police are a bit slow and stale. And John Lemont’s direction is more reminiscent of a TV show than a movie (on the plus side, if you watch this on DVD instead of in a theater, you are not missing anything). For those reasons, the film goes into the good rather than great category.

As a closing note: Norrie Paramor’s jazzy title song became a big hit for Britain’s premier instrumental group of the era, the Shadows. Just for fun, you can see their totally pukka rendition of the theme on Crackerjack. Love those suits and dance steps!

Categories
Action/Adventure Mystery/Noir

Devil in a Blue Dress

SFMOMA

For years, I believed that no one would ever write a Los Angeles detective novel as well as did Raymond Chandler. But then a friend gave me the book Black Betty, which changed my mind. Walter Mosley’s detective, Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins roams in an atmospheric, corrupt, and dangerous LA just as did Phillip Marlowe, but Easy practices his trade as a Black man in the 1940s. In Mosley’s hands, that difference opens up a world of plot, character, emotion and social comment that countless Caucasian detective novel authors before him never explored. Devil in a Blue Dress is an underappreciated film adaption of Mosley’s novel of the same name.

As the story opens, Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington) is in a bind. Back from service in World War II and the proud possessor of a GI bill-financed mortgage on his very own house, Easy is fired by his white boss on specious grounds. Desperate for money, he agrees to help find a missing woman for a local hood (a memorably sleazy Tom Sizemore) who claims to be working for a former mayoral candidate. Easy’s investigation reveals that the woman has an African-American female friend that he knows, and who finds Easy hard to resist. He gets a lead on the missing woman (Jennifer Beals) but then there is a murder and everything goes pear-shaped. Soon the police and the criminals are both gunning for Easy, tempting him to call in a favor from an old friend named Mouse (Don Cheadle) who has a penchant for extreme violence.

Director Carl Franklin, recognized as a modern film noir maven since he made One False Move, is in complete command of the tone and style of the movie. Even though this was not a big budget production, the 1940s sets, cars, and clothing look smashing, while Elmer Bernstein’s fine score and some outstanding period music add flavor and style. It’s also fascinating to see a rarity in Hollywood films: Post-war Black neighborhoods of Los Angeles brought to life (the local man with mental illness that Easy encounters is beyond perfect as a realistic, humanizing touch). Even if those aspects of the film don’t grab you, Mosley’s source material provides a complex, exciting mystery for Easy to solve, making the movie effective as a detective story as well.

As in Mosley’s books, the African-American point of view alters and thereby freshens up the old tropes of detective fiction. A midnight meeting with a business associate at the pier? Normally no problem, but this time it’s in white-dominated Malibu, and you can see the wariness in Washington’s eyes with every step he takes. Meet a doll-face dame and chat her up? Not so simple when she’s white and there are white men around itching to give you a beat down. The standard “police interrogation of the interfering private eye” bit? It’s a hell of a lot more scary when you realize that the cops could shoot Easy and dump his body somewhere as they never could with a Caucasian detective. And finally, without spoiling the film, the entire mystery turns on race and racism in a powerful way, including how even the most privileged individual white people can end up suffering from the color line they collectively create.

Continue reading “Devil in a Blue Dress”