I've posted before about the innovations in photographic equipment which allowed for the first action shots of war by correspondents covering the Mexican Revolution. They made most of their income by selling their images of the war as postcards — like the one above, featuring Pancho Villa himself, in the light suit flanked by the two darker-clad men.
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
This poem was not published during Keats's lifetime. It was found after his death, written or copied on the manuscript of another poem. The last line is startling, as though the poet were trying to reach out from the page, emphasized by the shift from the expected “thee” to “you” in the last line. In Keats's day “thee” was considered the loftier usage, more fitting for a poetic utterance — “you” brings the poem into the world of vernacular speech, like the hand trying to reach out into the reader's reality. Keats holds his hand out not to thee, gentle reader of poetry, but to you — you, whoever you are.
Since this was one of the last poems Keats wrote, when he knew he was dying, we can read the reaching out as something directed at us, at posterity, from the grave he knew he would soon inhabit. Perhaps it also embodies a cry of despair about the limits of poetry itself. On a more literal level it may have been addressed to Fanny Brawne, his muse, from whom he knew he would soon be parting.
The sketch of Keats above is by Charles Brown, made in 1819. Within two years the beautiful boy it records would be dead of consumption at the age of 25, in Rome, where he had traveled in hopes of a miracle cure. A letter from Brawne which reached him after his death was buried with him, unopened. At his request these words were carved on his headstone — “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Within the long shadow of Eternity, all our names are writ in water, but the brook where Keats's name is writ still sings, and will probably continue to do so for quite some time.
The Bad and the Beautiful is sometimes called a film noir but it's nothing of the sort — it's a romantic soap opera whose stylistic “darkness” is purely aesthetic and whose thematic “darkness” derives from simple perversity. A true film noir presents the image of a morally chaotic universe, a universe in which moral choices are either unclear or existentially useless — The Bad and the Beautiful glamorizes evil and asks us to love it.
The Bad and the Beautiful is the only film ever made about Hollywood which manages to capture its peculiar culture of perversity. Hollywood, in the classic studio era, was not about money. Given the fact that the major studios had a virtual monopoly over film distribution, money was a given. Movies were a rigged game. It wasn't about power, either — power was also a given, a consequence of all that money. And it wasn't about sex — money and power guaranteed sex, not only for the beautiful people who paraded their wares in front of a camera but for the nerdy little businessmen who organized the parade.
The coin of the realm in Hollywood was brutality and betrayal . The ability to hurt other people, especially one's friends and allies, with impunity was the one entitlement that signified genuine status in Hollywood. It was the only behavior that had a lasting and enduring glamor there.
The Bad and the Beautiful is about (and also part and parcel of) the sentimental myth created in Hollywood to lend a romantic flavor to the puerile exercise of brutality and betrayal — by insisting that it was all for art, for the good of the picture, for the good of the public. This myth was meant to disguise the fact that brutality and betrayal had an erotic charge in Hollywood, that it constituted a kind of moral pornography — that it existed for its own sake.
In a world of total material and sensual satiation, moral perversity was the only thing still capable of delivering a charge. It was the sort of charge that attaches to a child killing an insect or a small animal, to high school kids tormenting an outsider into suicidal despair, to the enslavement and torture and destruction of helpless people by governments.
Simone Weil wrote, “Brutality,
violence, and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide
from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows
before.” This insight is the key to Hollywood's culture, and to The Bad and the Beautiful. For The Bad and the Beautiful is not about money, not about power, not about sex — not even about filmmaking or Hollywood per se. Its emotional climaxes, its juice, come from moments of lurid, glamorized, unrepentant brutality and betrayal.
One might say the same for most of Greek drama, of course, and much of Shakespeare. The difference is that The Bad and the Beautiful calls down no retribution from Olympus, from the inexorable workings of fate. In Sophocles as in Shakespeare, the frisson of moral perversity is part of the entertainment, but there is a price to be paid. In the perpetual adolescence of Hollywood, so brilliantly evoked in The Bad and the Beautiful, no price is exacted — except a kind of emptiness, that money and power and celebrity and Oscars can't fill up. There is that kind of emptiness at the heart of The Bad and the Beautiful, but it's not acknowledged. The film is a perfect paradigm of true spiritual despair — a despair that is unaware of itself.
Given a terrific story, Lon Chaney in the role of a lifetime, some of the most spectacular sets ever built in Hollywood, a cast of thousands and a decent cinematographer, even Wallace Worsley could make a great movie — and in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame I think he did.
There's a lot about the film one could criticize. Much of the filmmaking and much of the acting, apart from Chaney's, is merely serviceable. Worsley can be clumsy in his staging of ensembles and in his handling of the comic relief. But with a film this entertaining, a film that showcases a performance like Chaney's, criticism seems a bit churlish.
Chaney's performance is highly theatrical, highly stylized, but it's always calculated in terms of movement, of dance. His physical presence is never less than riveting. He doesn't stint on the grotesque aspect of Quasimodo, whose teeth seem to be rotting out of his head and whose tongue flicks out like a lizard's when he gets excited. He's genuinely repellent — which only makes the revelation of his kind heart more affecting.
Orson Welles said that as a kid he never had much interest in movies as a medium per se — what he was interested in was movie actors, and he singled out Chaney's Quasimodo as one of the performances that most inspired him. This probably had a lot to do with Welles's lifelong interest in make-up effects, especially his obsession with facial applications, which he wore in almost all of his stage and screen roles.
In The Hunchback, Chaney's Quasimodo pops in and out at irregular intervals through most of the film. When he takes center stage in the final reels, the movie sings as only a silent film can. Chaney dances to a melody that only he and Quasimodo can hear — until suddenly, by following the shapes and rhythms of the dance, we can hear it, too. It's a kind of miracle.
Sadly, the film survives only in poor prints. Kino's recent “Ultimate Edition” on DVD is mastered from what's identified as an “original”
tinted print, and it's not bad, considering. The movie still manages to shine through the scratches — and makes one dream about what the thing must have looked like on its initial release. The Kino edition also offers a fine commentary by Michael Blake, Chaney's biographer and a make-up artist himself, who provides a wealth of information about the cast members and the production. The musical score, complied by Donald
Hunsberger and orchestrated and conducted by the always reliable Robert
Israel, is first-rate.
The web log If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger is a new thing under the sun — a kind of journal of visual culture composed almost entirely of images, with minimal comment. I think of mardecortesbaja as primarily a journal of visual culture, though the commentary has an equal place with the images. But at Charlie Parker it's mostly the images that talk — to us and, perhaps more importantly, to each other. The result is a sort of subliminal conversation that too much interpretation would drown out.
Tom Sutpen, one of the guiding lights at Charlie Parker, has just started a different kind of web log, Illusion Travels By Streetcar, devoted to his writing about film. In the first post, he produces this evocation of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which he jotted down on a legal pad for some writing project he can no longer remember:
Metropolis,
that occult skyscraper of vision piled atop ever more crazed vision; of
fairy tale narrative and futuristic nightmare; of half-buried eroticism
and a mystic symbology lifted, with all the weightless ease of an empty
bottle, from the Old Testament; all in service to a vaguely Socialist
fever dream its director, Fritz Lang, had no real interest in. That
tattered Metropolis, in all of its deranged willfulness and splendor, will almost certainly never be seen in its entirety again.
It's a lovely piece of writing and a fine summary of the film but its last line has taken on a new resonance with the news, only recently reported and now spreading through the Internet like wildfire, that a complete print of Metropolis has been discovered, in a film archive in Buenos Aires. It's a 16mm preservation copy of a battered 35mm original, but it's all there — the film as Lang originally made it, before it got cut down by its American distributor — the only known copy of the complete film in existence. (The image above is a frame-grab from the print.)
This is exciting in itself and also for the wild hopes it arouses that other lost footage might someday still be found — a copy of Von Stroheim's four-hour cut of Greed, for example, or the footage RKO cut from The Magnificent Ambersons.
But enough dreaming. Check out Sutpen's new blog — I suspect it's going to be essential reading for movie fans.
Check out “Mexico”, not the James Taylor song of the same name, but a somewhat obscure Elvis track from Fun In Acapulco. Thanks to Tony D'Ambra of the invaluable films noir web site for reminding me of it, in a post about The Big Steal, a prime example of fiesta noir — a film that starts out noir but goes goofy when it gets south of the border.
Elvis's “Mexico” is a slight bit of material but Elvis makes it fun — and manages to remind me how much I miss Baja California and La Paz.
Elvis sings the song in the movie — it can also be found on the soundtrack album and on the two-disc set Command Performances which collects most of the songs from the Elvis movies not included on the various Masters box sets.
If you'd like to eavesdrop on a couple of legendary show business pros talking shop, scoot over to If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, which has posted a fascinating recording of Judy Garland and Noel Coward giving a joint interview to Redbook magazine in 1961. I've contributed a few guesses as to the occasion that brought them together and the identity of a fourth voice on the tape (in addition to the magazine interviewer's) — but what's fun is to just listen to these two entertainers talk. Coward had been on the stage professionally since the age of ten, Garland since the age of two — between them they'd pretty much seen it all and done it all.
They both retain a childlike quality, but that's part of what an entertainer's job is all about — being childlike with the technique of a brain surgeon.
While you're at the site, check out the latest installment of the Truffaut-Hitchcock tapes, the recordings from which Truffaut assembled his great book of interviews with the master. More show-biz shop talk and always worth a listen.
Follow this link for the sixth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin . . .
The sixth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.
Movies
achieve their highest aesthetic enchantment and greatest power to move
us emotionally by creating the illusion of spaces on the other side of
the screen which we can inhabit imaginatively. It's not the fact
that moving pictures move that moves us, it's the fact that movement is one of the chief ways that spatial illusions are created.
The coherence of the spatial illusion is crucial, not just in
individual shots but in the combination of shots through editing.
Single photographic images have a kind of built-in spatial coherence,
though they can be lit and composed in ways that counteract this
inherent quality — flattening the image, for example, so that we have
a hard time evaluating the depth of the space recorded. But even
images with spatial depth all shot in a single location can be combined
in such a way as to confuse us about the totality of the space they are
meant to suggest.
Almost any competent director can create the basic illusion of a
coherent space. The simplest way to do this is to follow
what has come to be the standard “studio style” — to start each scene
in a particular location with a master shot showing the overall space
of the scene and then cut in to closer shots of people or objects
within that scene, whose place in the spatial scheme has already been
established. There are endless variations of this method.
One can open a scene on a close-up of an object or an actor and then cut to a master
shot, but the master shot always serves as the ground of the illusion,
the point of orientation, even if that orientation is delayed.
We would find it very difficult to imaginatively inhabit a scene whose
spatial coherence was impossible or difficult to read — even if we
could construct it intellectually in our minds based on disparate
visual cues.
But the illusion of spatial coherence is merely the bottom line for
imaginative participation in a cinematic shot or scene. The
greatest, most pleasing and most powerful films create spatial
illusions that seduce us into the imaginary spaces of the work — which
invite or viscerally compel us into the spatial illusion.
This is where the art of cinema begins, and all great directors have
known how to seduce us in this way. They seem to have come into
possession of this knowledge by instinct, almost to have been born with
it. It doesn't, in other words, seem to be a knowledge that can
be taught, except perhaps by example. We have no language for
analyzing this knowledge systematically.
But there is a system to such seduction. It can be used in
complex and subtle ways to manipulate our emotional involvement in and
reaction to the narrative elements of a film. Allowing us to
enter the illusory space on screen at our own pace, as with a
deep-focus shot in which the choreography of the actors emphasizes the
space slowly and subtly, creates a different emotional effect than
hurtling us into an illusory space by a rapid movement of the camera,
one mounted on the top of a speeding train, for example. A master
shot looking down on the scene has different effect than a master shot
looking straight-on. A master shot which tracks in on a detail or
a character has a different effect than isolating the element with a
cut, and a master shot in which an element moves towards the camera
into a close-up has a different effect again.
Such variations of effect have been part of the crude methods of cinema
from the beginning, and account for the omnipresence of the chase as a
climactic device. Even if it has no logical raison d'etre,
a chase is almost always cathartic — by creating the illusion of rapid
movement through space the chase reaffirms and satisfies our attraction
to the basic
method and charm of cinema. It creates emotional involvement with
the characters, the pursuer and the pursued, quite beyond any conscious
involvement arising from the dramatic narrative. When Orson
Welles said that every great film was a chase he was acknowledging this
fundamental principal.
But when such visceral involvement is manipulated in complex ways in the service of
dramatic narrative, of character exposition, cinema rises to the level
of great art, an art founded in the creation of coherent and seductive
spatial illusions.
My friends Tracy and John had a baby today. His name is Maxwell.
Welcome to the world, kid.
Things just keep getting better and better for fans of classic American comic strips. Little Orphan Annie has just been added to the list of strips that are being reprinted in volumes that will eventually cover the entire runs of these comics.
The first volume is available now. It includes the first few years of the strip, beautifully reproduced, mostly from Harold Gray's original drawings or from the syndication proofs. In them, the plucky Annie knocks about America spreading kindness or kicking ass, as the situation requires.
Here's a philosophical question for you. Why was it that American popular culture, back in the darkest days of patriarchy, kept coming up with images of powerful little girls, like Annie and Dorothy of Kansas, who set off on their own on dangerous journeys and triumphed over all adversities by force of character . . . while in our own nominally feminist age the most prominent role models for young girls are sexually objectified teen tartlets?
There are now four volumes out of the early Dick Tracy strips, seven or eight of Krazy Kat, three of Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates, two books which contain complete runs of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze and Dreams Of the Rarebit Fiend — plus two huge volumes which reprint color Sunday pages from Gasoline Alley and Little Nemo In Slumberland. If you pile them all up beside your bed or easy chair and read a few strips or pages a day, you've got your own personal funny pages to hand, some compensation for the fact that modern newspapers have no space for popular art this brilliant and this entertaining.
There's been such an uproar, such expressions of shock, over the possibility that a group of girls at a high school in Gloucester, Massachusetts may have entered into a pact to get pregnant and help each other raise their babies. It strikes me as a perfectly reasonable proposition, given the world these young women are living in. They obviously have no expectation of finding young men willing to be committed husbands and fathers, so they are doing what female elephants do — they are organizing for a matriarchal social order.
In the social order of elephants, young males are forced out of the herd as soon as they attain sexual maturity. The males wander about singly or in small groups, getting into all sorts of trouble, fighting with each other and destroying things, and are let back into the herd only long enough to mate with sexually mature females — at which point they are forcibly ejected once again. The young are raised exclusively by females. It's a kind of pregnancy pact.
Male elephants have not made the case to female elephants that they could be useful for something other than impregnating them, and female elephants have responded in the only logical way possible — they have taken responsibility for organizing their society along lines that ensure both stability and the perpetuation of the species.
Given the state of American manhood these days, why should American women — at least those more interested in motherhood than in careers — behave any differently? Check out the iconography of the ad for Juno at the head of this post — it's very easy to read. Men are clueless dorks, it says — women rule. Juno stands before an orange evocation of the American flag like George C. Scott at the beginning of Patton. The guy doesn't seem to know where he is or what he's doing there. He could vanish and it would make no difference to Juno whatsoever.
If there was a pregnancy pact in Gloucester it may just mark the beginning of a massive earthshaking female elephant stampede. Young American men may have to prepare themselves for a lifetime of wandering around aimlessly, rubbing the bark off of trees for no good reason at all.
This legendary film has a set-up that promises a rattling good yarn —
two lifelong friends pitted against each other in mortal combat by a
callow but irresistible woman. It is directed in bravura style, with
flashes of cinematic brilliance, by a master of film narrative,
Clarence Brown, and it features two of the silent screen's most
appealing actors, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. The result is
watchable, even entertaining — but deeply unsatisfying on almost every
level.
We see in this film what the 20th-Century, and the studio system in
Hollywood, did to the melodrama — perverting it meretriciously,
heartlessly, systematically, fatally.
The melodrama of the Victorian stage, of Griffith and Pickford and even
Murnau, was a stylized form in which a glamorized virtue was beset by
crude though recognizable obstacles which seemed invincible but which
virtue could vanquish, though often only by self-sacrifice and in death.
We may laugh at the form today, or find it charmingly quaint, but it
represented a sophisticated dramatic tradition capable of conveying
deep emotion and serious moral reflection. It is hardly more laughable
or quaint than modern forms, in which a superior display of aptitude
with firearms can right any wrong, in which glamor or cuteness alone
can resolve any romantic complication, in which material or
professional success signals the triumph of the good.
Melodrama only becomes grotesque and artificial when those who make it
lose faith, consciously or unconsciously, in virtue, especially in
self-sacrificial virtue. In our self-obsessed age, at least before 11
September 2001, virtue became suspect — a sucker's game — and sacrifice
unthinkable. Not being able to have it all seemed a crime against a
basic entitlement of humanity — or at least that part of it lucky
enough to be born into Western middle-class comfort.
This is why modern intellectual sophisticates laughed at the melodrama
of Titanic, though its moral complexity far exceeded the dime-store
nihilism, or self-referential fantasy, delivered by the hip filmmakers
of the 90's. It was taken seriously, however, by ordinary people — and
especially by teenage women, who knew on some level that the nihilism
and fantasy of their parents' generation had come to a dead end, had
not prepared them for the world they saw before them, the world of
Columbine and Osama bin Laden.
Flesh and the Devil represents a first step in the destruction of
melodrama as a viable form — as Titanic may represent a first step
in its rehabilitation. In Flesh and the Devil, virtue is dessicated
— evil lush and ripe. Though the story tells us again and again that
Barbara Kent is the good girl and Greta Garbo the bad girl, every
single act of craft and genius on display in the film struggles to
persuade us otherwise.
We are far from Griffith and Pickford here, whose great heroines showed
us how appealing, energetic, sexy and even seductive virtue could be.
Greta Garbo becomes, in essence, the auteur of Flesh and the Devil,
because all its narrative ploys, all its moral stances, collapse into
worship of her mysterious presence, her oddly luminous flesh.
In strictly narrative terms, there has rarely been a more extreme
example of misogyny on film. Garbo's character is unremittingly evil —
her heartlessness, until the last unconvincing moments of the role, is
absolute, her greed and selfishness both repellent and unmitigated. But
Brown's camera and Brown's casting and Brown's staging worship at her
feet. All the other characters are perfunctorily drawn, wooden in
presentation, with two exceptions. One is the kindly old priest who is
roused to an almost sexual excitement by his hatred of the Garbo
character — a hatred which the narrative invites us to share. The
other is Gilbert . . . who struggles manfully to discover a complexity,
a moral gravity in his character. In his final scenes he almost
succeeds, but the odds are against him, the game was rigged from the
start. The film believes in nothing but Garbo — virtue has no defense
against her, can reassert itself only by killing her.
One thinks of what the film could have been if those who made it were
aware of this — had some sense of the moral questions it raises. If
Garbo's character had been granted a soul, instead of stripped of it,
if Barbara Kent's character had been given even a hint of Gish's or
Pickford's complexity and will and sensuality, the delicious
possibilities of the tale could have unfolded into real melodrama —
which is to say, real drama.
But this film is an early demonstration of the use of a star to avoid
drama, to avoid moral questions, to parade unfelt clichés and
undeveloped characters and irresponsible attitudes before an audience
mesmerized by glamor alone. A melodrama in which virtue has evaporated
is not melodrama anymore — it's more like Grand Guignol, without the
shameless energy, the giddy frissons, the amoral abandon of a real
Theater of Blood.
I'm not sure we can blame Garbo's collaborators too harshly for this,
though — she is sui generis. There is really no word for what she does
on screen. It's not acting, it's not even performing — she is simply a
creature who has her being on film . . . the camera devours her, every
molecule of her. The process leaves nothing behind — no memory of a
character, or even of a human being caught on film. She paradoxically
incarnates the gossamer moods of certain kinds of passion, certain
kinds of physical enchantment — and vanishes as mysteriously as they
do. But it's useless to deny how spectacular the phenomenon is, how
strange and pleasurable — just as it's useless to deny the charm of
falling in love.
Brown and his cameraman and his screenwriters and his actors may have
to be forgiven for losing their heads in her presence, and even for
hating her power to undo them so utterly.
The image above, Griffin Lava Breath, is from a new show by Amanda Visell opening today at the M Modern Gallery in Palm Springs, California. The show is called Tic Toc Apocalypse and features images of horror done in a cheerful cartoon-modern style. What fun!
Click here for a preview of the show.
I've had many strange experiences in Las Vegas, but none stranger that seeing David Irving speak in a small banquet room at the Jokers Wild Casino, a little locals' joint on Boulder Highway, at the edge of town.
Irving is a very controversial historian of the Third Reich whom I've written about before, here and here. The most prodigious researcher in the German archives pertaining to National Socialism, and in the archives of the Allies that house captured German documents on the subject, Irving has written a series of books which are essential compendia of facts about Hitler and his state. But he has a bias — a desire to show that Hitler and the Nazis weren't as bad as everybody thinks, and that the Allied leaders were far worse than anybody thinks.
His motives in this are suspect, since he occasionally reveals anti-Semitic attitudes that offend the conscience, but his facts are always right, even if he marshals them to serve a twisted argument. His books are respected, with reservations, by respectable historians, but he has been vilified mercilessly by just about everybody else.
He was imprisoned for over a year, in solitary confinement, in Austria for giving a speech in which he noted that the gas chambers at the Auschwitz historical site are reconstructions, which is true, and arguing that gassing was not in fact used systematically to kill prisoners there, which is hotly contested by other historians and by eyewitnesses. His words were thought to violate Austrian laws against Holocaust denial.
Irving is not exactly a Holocaust denier — more of a Holocaust minimizer. He admits that many bad things were done to Jews by the Nazis, just not as many bad things as historians have claimed. And he insists that Hitler was out of the loop as far as the Final Solution was concerned — that Himmler instituted mass killings on his own hook, so that the “Messiah” of the German Reich would not be tainted by the policy.
This strains credulity, of course — imagining that a faithful lieutenant would do something so momentous on his own, something which Hitler would be held accountable for even if he knew nothing about it. Still, Irving can point to the fact that no document recording Hitler's acquiescence in the mass extermination of Jews survives, and that Himmler regularly removed allusions to the policy from reports he passed on to the Führer.
It strikes me as more likely that Himmler simply had an understanding with Hitler that the policy of extermination would not be referenced in high-level documents of any kind, so that Hitler would never have to contend with opposition to it from his high-placed generals and ministers, and that Himmler would take the fall for it politically if it ever became generally known. It wouldn't be the first time a politician used plausible deniability to try and cover his ass.
It's equally possible that documents recording Hitler's involvement in the Final Solution were destroyed before or during the apocalypse of Germany's collapse.
When I showed up at the Jokers Wild Casino I almost bumped into Irving as he wheeled a cart with boxes of his books into the place. I greeted him but he hurried on gruffly, perhaps embarrassed by being seen in shorts and a sports-shirt hauling his own merchandise.
His talk was held after a buffet dinner, included in the price of the lecture, in a small private room off the casino's coffee shop. The food was school cafeteria quality and barely warm. There were about eleven other people in attendance. I kept to myself, fearing what sort of conversations my fellow attendees might initiate. I overheard one older guy railing against democracy — “It allows people to let off steam, to think they have some say over their government. America isn't a government, anyway . . . it's a corporation.”
Irving's talk was generally reasonable. He spoke at length about his imprisonment, and the tale was genuinely harrowing. Irving reported to the outside world that the library of his prison contained several books he had written. At this point, a high Austrian official ordered all books by Irving in all Austrian prisons to be removed and burned — “To show the world that we have moved beyond the Nazi era.” The minister seemed to see no irony in using a book burning to demonstrate this point.
Irving then talked about his forthcoming biography of Himmler, which he promised would put to rest once and for all the idea that Hitler knew about the Holocaust. He said he expected to endure further persecution upon its publication.
Irving said a few troubling things. He said he told the Austrian press when he was finally released from prison that “Mel Gibson was right.” He didn't elaborate on this in Austria, but to us he explained, “You know, about who started all the world's wars.” In other words, the Jews. He said that Churchill did not become anti-Nazi until after he was paid 48 thousand pounds by a Jewish organization in 1936 — an amount, Irving said, worth about 3 million dollars in today's currency. The implication was that all of Churchill's fine rhetoric was bought and paid for by Jews.
An odd evening with an odd man in an odd place in an odd town. That's Vegas, baby.