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friedman-21
Reviews
The Enchanted Forest (1945)
Loved this film as a child
I only saw it once, when I was around 5 or 6. It was beautiful and I loved it, would like very, very much to see it again. I had seen Bambi and the sense of the forest and wild animals in Bambi was amazing and wonderous, the film full of the beauty of nature and life. And then The Enchanted Forest was beautiful--and quite frightening, too, in what it spoke of life's sadnesses as well--much as Bambi had been. I don't think I ever saw, as a child, any other films that brought forth the raw glorious beauty and power and tenuousness of life to anywhere near the extent that these two movies did. And now one can find Bambi sometimes playing somewhere, or on an old disk, or streamed, but where can one find "The Enchanted Forest'/
Fireside Theatre: The Shot/The Bed by the Window (1950)
two old persons share a nursing home room
In their final months or years, two old persons are placed in a nursing home room; the room is drab, their lives depressing. Day after day, night after night, they lie in bed; the staff always keep the shade on the window pulled down.
The patient in the bed by the inner wall longs for the bed by the window--for the other patient, the one in the window-side bed, manages from time to time to lift up the shade a bit and to peer out, recounting the life out there, the view of a far-off river, the progress of a building crane beyond the street. . .
This is a plot I later came on in another format, film or short story--not sure by which famed author. What I'm sure of is I've never forgotten this Fireside Theater piece.
Die weiße Rose (1982)
unforgettable film honoring once-forgotten heroes
Harrowing and unforgettable, this film follows a group of mostly student resistors in Nazi Germany as they discover what their country's regime is doing to war prisoners and to Jews, and try to work out nonviolent ways to get the truth to their compatriots and resist a regime that massacres. The film seems as accurate as re-creations of history get. I had the honor of meeting three survivors of the White Rose once, in Berkeley, California, in 1992 or so when they accompanied a showing of panels and photos about the group. It is extraordinary that there was this resistance--one with much that those opposed to today's wars could learn from and emulate--yet nearly no one knew of this for decades. I remember in 1969 someone speaking of a thesis about "resistors in Nazi Germany," and when I laughed at such a seeming oxymoron, he told me, "Yes we laugh because we haven't heard of them--because nearly all of them died." See the film and see one form that courage can take.
Rocketship X-M (1950)
antinuclear drama was a first
When I saw this as a young teen (early 1950s, on broadcast television), I was immensely moved by the tragic love story, immensely glad to find--finally--some movie out there actually saying what most of us growing up in the shadow of the Bomb were secretly feeling: that nuclear war was hardly a help to sacrosanct "National Security" but, rather, a threat to all life on Earth; just as the explorers in Rocketship XM were to find on Mars, nuclear bombs could indeed destroy a civilization, turn a world to desert. I don't think it was mere teenage romanticism that made the lovers' heroic, passionate, tragic deaths so unforgettable, either; this was a film about the struggle of life against doom. And I am delighted to learn, here on IMDb, that the film was written by Dalton Trumbo, the politically astute author whose novel Brave Cowboy, as the film Lonely Are the Brave, with its anti-Establishment hero riding his horse toward Mexico and shooting down the pursuing police helicopter, ushered in, for some of us in Berkeley, California, in early autumn 1964, the whole Movement era.