Music focus in Jiles’ ‘Simon the Fiddler’
‘Cinema history’
‘Simon the Fiddler” by Paulette Jiles
(William Morrow) “Simon the Fiddler” is the original story of Simon Boudlin, a traveling musician who appears in Paulette Jiles’ 2016 novel, the National Book Award finalist “News of the World.”
When we meet the 23-year-old – “5-foot-5 and 120 pounds” – he is recently conscripted into the Confederate army. Combining Don Quixote’s romance with the down-to-earth nature of his traveling companion Sancho, Simon is an indefatigable character who makes you want to root for him. “(The fiddle) was all he had against a chaotic world and the mindlessness of a losing war, against corruption, thievery, cowardice, incompetence, cactus, gunsmoke, and hominy,” writes Jiles.
After the South surrenders in 1865, Simon assembles a ragtag band to eke out a living amid the devastation. They’ll play anywhere for anyone, but as Simon tells his bandmates before their first gig, “they’ve got to damn well pay us.”
It’s at that first gig that Simon is smitten with Doris Dillon, a young woman he spies in the company of Col. Webb, the commander of the occupying Union forces. He can’t take his eyes off her “round face” and “beautiful dark blue eyes” and from that moment on, Simon’s ambition is clear, if not his fate.
Jiles’ sparse but lyrical writing is a joy to read. As the band checks out possible venues in Galveston, Texas, she dips into her main character’s mind: “To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. … It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.”
Later on, as Simon concludes that it won’t be easy to buy a plot of land in the Red River Valley for his dream life with Doris: “It was going to take some doing. … But that’s why God made people young at first, to get the doing done.”
The pace of the novel quickens as Simon and Doris make plans. There are plots and schemes and scrapes, and above it all, music. It’s right there in the title – “Simon the Fiddler” – and it’s definitely there in the denouement as Jiles’ novel comes to a hopeful conclusion.
It’s a beautifully written book and a worthy followup to “News of the World.” That novel is due in theaters, starring Tom Hanks, later this year (and just in time for the Oscars). Until then, lose yourself in this entertaining tale.
“Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies,” Rutgers University Press, by Stephen Farber and
Michael McClellan
What was the greatest year in cinema history? Among film fans and critics, 1939 has long been a favorite pick. Hollywood’s studio system was at its peak that year and cranked out an astonishing number of crowd-pleasing, star-studded films including “The Wizard of Oz,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Ninotchka,” “Stagecoach” and “Dark Victory.” At the top of that formidable heap was “Gone with the Wind,” which won eight Oscars, including best picture.
A new history by Los Angeles film critics and scholars Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan offers a different and, for many, surprising alternative. In their audaciously titled “Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies,” they argue that the early ‘60s in general – and 1962 in particular – deserve recognition not just for big-wave beach movies, but also for newwave films from abroad and for the emergence of a generation of American auteurs who were fashioning a mold-breaking new Hollywood. Strictly by numbers, 1962 may not have produced as many enduring classics as 1939, a year that placed 19 films on the Library of Congress’ prestigious National Film Registry, more than twice the eight such films from 1962. But 1962’s importance rests on the artistic daring of its films, and on the unprecedented willingness of filmmakers to tackle taboo subjects at a time when the production codes and the censorious Legion of Decency still wielded influence on Hollywood producers and American audiences.
Echoing the emerging civil rights spirit of the early ’60s, for example, “To Kill a Mockingbird” poignantly indicted racial injustice, though not without objections from film raters for its frequent use of the “n-word.” “Lolita” depicted an older man’s obsession with a preadolescent girl. The British import “A Taste of Honey” offered an unusually adult portrayal of homosexuality and scored well with audiences. Bosley Crowther, The New York Times’ powerful film critic, called it the year’s best film.
Hollywood’s studio system may have been declining in 1962 but reliable stars like Doris Day, John Wayne, James Stewart and Bette Davis still churned out an impressive number of hit films. Wayne and Stewart starred in director John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Screen veteran Rosalind Russell put an indelible stamp on the lead role of Rose in “Gypsy.” Davis and Joan Crawford gave unforgettably creepy performances in the psychological thriller “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” whose poster the authors feature on their book jacket.
From abroad, filmmakers were drawing American audiences as never before with movies that broke new artistic ground. Among them were Federico Fellini (“La Dolce Vita”), Francois Truffaut (“Jules et Jim”), Tony Richardson (“The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”), Pietro Germi (“Divorce Italian Style”) and Michelangelo Antonioni (“La Notte”).
The authors add spice and credibility to their history with interviews of survivors of 1962 filmmaking, including Mariette Hartley who made her debut in director Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country”; Shirley Knight, who starred with Paul Newman in the sexually charged “Sweet Bird of Youth”; and Angela Lansbury, who gave a deliciously villainous performance in director John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate.”
The book ends with a chapter-long appraisal of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” 1962’s most honored, commercially successful and technically dazzling film. It featured a sophisticated plot replete with political chicanery, colonialism and a subtle depiction of the title character’s homosexuality, and a superb cast of old hands like Claude Rains as well as relative newcomers Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. Yet fascinatingly, it drew only mixed reviews. (AP)