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It would be nice to have a pleasant decade sometime -- even a pleasant year. I think that maybe 1987 is the last year I can look back on as having been pleasurable most of the way through. 23 years ago -- that's sad.
Film Recommendation: Go Tell the Spartans, Ted Post. It's not unreasonable to consider Post in juxtaposition to Clint Eastwood, whom he directed in Hang 'Em High, Magnum Force, and many episodes of Rawhide. As any busy television director must, Post had a command of the classical style of film-making, and Go Tell the Spartans shows what that command can accomplish wedded to a subject and screenplay of significance. Based on Daniel Ford's novel Incident at Muc Wa and set in the early years of the Vietnam War, when American forces were still "advisory," this is a clear-eyed view of the tragedy that embeds it in the larger context of military history (as the title indicates). Never slow to recognize quality, Burt Lancaster makes the most of a plum part and, bless him, financed the film's completion out of his own pocket. Against the heady competition of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, this is the best Vietnam War film I have ever seen.
Among notables born on this date are the novelists E.M. Forster, J.D. Salinger, Maria Edgeworth, and Mariano Azuela (of Mexico); English poet Arthur Hugh Clough; Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi; English playwright Joe Orton; French playwright Ludovic Halevy; photographer Alfred Stieglitz; New Zealand architect Robert Lawson; controversial aviation pioneer Gustave Whitehead (did he fly before the Wrights or didn't he?); American patriot and silversmith Paul Revere; conductor Artur Rodzinski; jazz vibraphonist Milt Jackson; hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash; and actor Dana Andrews. John Singleton Copley's portrait of Paul Revere was one of my favorite paintings to visit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston when I lived in Massachusetts:
