Continuing the reinterpretation of ‘Letters to a Young Poet’

Letter 3:
Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy)
April 23, 1903
You gave me much pleasure, dear Sir, with your Easter letter; for it brought much good news of you, and the way you spoke about Jacobsen’s great and beloved art showed me that I was not wrong to guide your life and its many questions to this abundance.
Now Niels Lyhne will open to you, a book of splendors and depths; the more often one reads it, the more everything seems to be contained within it, from life’s most imperceptible fragrances to the full, enormous taste of its heaviest fruits. In it there is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, held, lived, and known in memory’s wavering echo; no experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others. You will experience the great happiness of reading this book for the first time, and will move through its numberless surprises as if you were in a new dream. But I can tell you that even later on one moves through these books, again and again, with the same astonishment and that they lose none of their wonderful power and relinquish none of the overwhelming enchantment that they had the first time one read them.
One just comes to enjoy them more and more, becomes more and more grateful, and somehow better and simpler in one’s vision, deeper in one’s faith in life, happier and greater in the way one lives.
And later on, you will have to read the wonderful book of the fate and yearning of Marie Grubbe, and Jacobsen’s letters and journals and fragments, and finally his verses which (even if they are just moderately well translated) live in infinite sound. (For this reason I would advise you to buy, when you can, the lovely Complete Edition of Jacobsen’s works, which contains all of these. It is in three volumes, well translated, published by Eugen Diederichs in Leipzig, and costs, I think, only five or six marks per volume.)

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The Man from Laramie – 1955, Anthony Mann

by Allan Fish

please note that The Naked Spur is not covered as it was previously published as part of the 1950s countdown.

(USA 1955 102m) DVD1/2

I belong where I am

p  William Goetz  d  Anthony Mann  w  Philip Yordan, Frank Burt  ph  Charles Lang Jnr  ed  William Lyon  m  George Duning  md  Morris Stoloff  art  Cary Odell

James Stewart (Will Lockhart), Arthur Kennedy (Vic Hansbro), Cathy O’Donnell (Barbara Waggoman), Donald Crisp (Alec Waggoman), Alex Nicol (Dave Waggoman), Aline MacMahon (Kate Canady), Wallace Ford (Charley O’Leary), Jack Elam (Chris Boldt), Frank DeKova (Padre),

It would be the final collaboration between Anthony Mann and James Stewart and their first in Cinemascope.  It wouldn’t be Mann’s final western, there were still a couple more to follow before turning his hand to his third genre – the historical epic – but it would perhaps be his most ambitious.  It’s said he always wanted to film King Lear in a western setting.  It had been done before by Joe Mankiewicz in the gangster world of House of Strangers and, in many ways, one can see where he was coming from.  He’d never get his wish, but despite elements in The Furies and Man of the West this is the nearest he came. 

            Stewart plays Will Lockhart, a former army captain who now makes money from transporting goods in his wagon to remote outposts on the trail and who has come to find out who sold the guns to Apaches who massacred a cavalry patrol which included his brother.  After delivering one such shipment of goods to Barbara Waggoman, the young store owner, he’s warned to leave, but he feels it’s a wasted journey to go back to Laramie with empty wagons.  He’s told there’s salt to be had at the local flats, but when he goes to take some he meets the psychotic Dave Waggoman, Barbara’s cousin, who burns his carts and kills his mules for sport before his father Alec’s manager, Vic, can stop him.  Vic has always looked up to Alec as a father at their ranch, The Barb, but Alec has always preferred to indulge his son, seeing it as Vic’s fault when Dave goes wild. 

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