Part 2 “The wicked flee when none pursueth.” (Proverbs 28:1). In the original novel by Charles Portis, the verse is quoted by Mattie Ross, the girl-heroine, in her dry narrator’s voice explaining the flight of Tom Cheney, the man who killed her father. Mattie is the revelation of…
Part 1 In Sergio Leone’s films (I’m thinking particularly of his trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), for the first time the dirt and sweat and moral complication of life on the frontier seemed to leave its…
This is a 3 part review of the Coen Brother’s film, True Grit. I’ll post it over the next 3 days. It is unashamedly meandering. But from the start you and I have a problem. I can’t really write about the film without disclosing information about the…
Murray Bail makes me fall in love with reading again. I picked up his newest novel, The Pages, yesterday – bought it on the basis of his name and the blurb on the back. No one writes Australia like Bail, his description of driving along Parramatta road in the first chapter…