Reviews – Movies and Books I’ve Done Before.

One nice thing about getting really old, is that I can't always remember if I have read a book or not when I check them out of the library. I used to keep a list of all the books I've read in the last 20 years or so, but now I forget to take it with me for reference. Sometimes it makes me angry to find I have read a book before, and at other times I enjoy reading the book again.

Such is the case with "Black and Blue" by Anna Quindlen, a book I checked out of the library last week. It is a well-written battered woman story that explores the reasons a woman stays with a husband who beats her. At first she blames it on the fact he was drunk at the time he struck her, then she begins to feel it is her fault and she comes to feel she is the one to blame. She reasons that she must have done something to antagonize him. If there are children involved, she justifies her staying as being better for them because they ‘need a father' and also because she will find it very hard to support and supervise them on her own.

Because she is a nurse, Beth, the heroine of "Black and Blue", knows the subject of battered women very well, yet postpones facing up to her dilemma until she knows she will be killed soon if she stays. She asks for help from a group who spirits battered women and their children away to a new life somewhere else within the country. She and her little boy are given new identities and roundabout passage to a small town in inland Florida, where they make a new beginning.

Throughout the story the author makes the reader aware that someday they will be found. The battering husband is a New York policeman, and he has access to high tech ways to find her. Yet it is human error finally gives them away. The ending is true to life. She both loses and yet wins a new happier life. The plot is predictable but so well written I enjoyed reading it again because I did so more carefully the second time around.

The movies I recommend are "When Legends Die" and "The Searchers". Both are repeated often on TV, but I hadn't seen either in over a year and last Sunday I was desperate to watch a good western.

"When Legends Die' starring Richard Widmark, and a fellow whose last name is Forrest (I think), was about a 12-year-old Ute Indian boy who had been living alone in the wilderness with a pet bear after his mother and father died. The tribal elders decide he has to be educated in modern ways, and persuade him by means of lying to him, to enter an Indian school.

He adapts, and at age 19 the boy, Tom Black Bull, is discovered by an old bronco rider turned con artist, a part played by Richard Widmark. The boy has a natural talent for training horses, and Widmark teaches him how to win at bronco riding on the rodeo circuits. The story is how this basically honorable Indian kid learns to exist in the white man's world and the choices he eventually makes. It is far from being a typical cowboys and Indians movie. I enjoy seeing it again and again.

As for "The Searchers" starring John Wayne, is there anyone in the USA who hasn't seen it? It concerns Ethan, (John Wayne) a veteran of the War Between the States, and is also a Texas Ranger; and a stepbrother who spend years together searching for their relative, Debbie, (Natalie Wood) who was taken captive by Indians after they have slaughtered the rest of her family and the dog.

An important premise to the story is Ethan's reluctance to bring Debbie home if they find her alive after so many years. Ethan is determined to kill her if she has taken up Indian ways, and the stepbrother (Jeffrey Hunter) is determined to bring her back alive under any circumstances.

This movie was made earlier under a different name and different stars playing the parts, but this version of the story is far superior. It is rich in well-defined characters, true to history (except for placing a Texas ranch in the Monument Valley), and there is quite a lot of humor as well as depiction of the hard living conditions in west Texas in those times. I think the movie won a well-deserved academy award for cinematography. I can enjoy it again and again about once a year.

I'm reading another very good book now by John Le Carre, and I might write about it when I finish it. I can't stress enough how much I enjoy books I find at our little country library in the next small town of Jacumba, CA right on the Mexican border.