I want to see that. Here's the NYT piece about it, "What Ethan Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’ Gets Right About Flannery O’Connor/Those familiar with her menagerie of grotesques, her views of Southern society, her tortured faith and inner contradictions will get what his film is doing," by Alissa Wilkinson. I like the second paragraph:
The screen adaptations of O’Connor’s work have not quite captured her essence... though some attempts have been more successful than others. A telling instance comes in “The Life You Save,” a 1957 TV adaptation of her short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” starring Gene Kelly in his first small-screen role. He plays Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed vagrant who talks a woman into taking him on as her handyman, then marries her mute, deaf daughter, Lucynell. Tom and Lucynell drive off toward their honeymoon and then, at a diner, as Lucynell naps on the counter, Tom makes his getaway. In the story, Tom picks up a hitchhiker, who insults him before leaping out of the car, and Tom just keeps driving away. In the TV version, however — presumably to avoid offending viewers’ delicate sensibilities — Tom has a change of heart, returning to the diner to retrieve Lucynell after all.
Aha! It's on YouTube — after originally playing on, I'm pleased to note, Schlitz Playhouse. Schlitz Playhouse! I love that. And it's not just Gene Kelly. It's also Agnes Moorehead:
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And where did TV like that wander off to? We watch all the old b&w shows - Alfred Hitchcock, Playhouse 90, Perry Mason, etc al. We even have a Western Night - Yancy Derringer anyone? Haven't watched a CBSNBCABCPBS prime time show in decades.
She sounds like her mom.
Always had mixed feelings about Ethan Hawke. He is a great actor. But he's also so full of himself, the actor. Or maybe that's just the make up of an actor. But as great an actor as he is, he's been in a whole lot of very mediocre movies that allow Ethan Hawke to talk incessantly about nothing. Much as is going on in this video of him and his daughter in the bowels of cinema buff heaven. I guess, to me he comes off as always acting, never just a regular guy. Maybe that IS his regular guy persona.
Master Thespian. Acting!.
The bit in the video vault reminds me of one of the many Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy flicks.
I don't think I've seen any of those listed at the end of the Hawks in the closet. Thanks.
Wildcat looks very good and the Southern accents aren't too cringey. A rarity.
Hawke is brilliant in a very silly Disney/Marvel project, Moon Knight. And in a very bad remake of Magnificent Seven, Hawke is mesmerizing. He's one of those actors who will get me to watch.
I only clicked through, though, because Agnes Moorhead was tagged. Endora scared me as a child.
I love that too…
…and Schlitz Playhouse! As a kid we went with the grandparents to the local Schlitz brewery. Parents got beer at the end, kids got beer can banks. It was glorious!
Maya was great in Stranger Things…
Lord save us all from Southern Gothic literature!
Precursor to Tennessee Williams.
I think I've seen one or two of the Hawke list, +1 depending on which War and Peace version it is.
A lot of people swear by O'Connor but I've never been that impressed. OTOH, Laura Linney.
The sets look pretty auth, and not all the accents are ridiculous, but I doubt I'll get around to this one. Wasn't there an adaptation of "The Violent Bear It Away?" some decades ago? Other than the ape-suit bit, I've forgotten what or who was in it.
I'm a well-read native Southerner, but I'm not really a fan of Southern fiction.
Flannery O'Connor had a grand talent. I'm not a fan, but I've read some of her stories. While reading them, you can't help but thinking who writes such haunted stories. The characters and the landscape they travel through are weirder than anything in science fiction. Apparently her life was more troubled and afflicted than any problems that she inflicted on her characters. I hope she went to Heaven after she died. That would be a neat plot twist.
I would dearly like to see a film version of Flannery O’Connor's short story: "A Good Man is Hard to Find." That short story haunts me even to this day.
180 * degrees wrong, tradguy.
Williams was older, and well-established as a Southern weirdo in the public mind, by the time O'Connor published anything off campus.
Tennessee Williams had a strong Memphis connection. His mother's parents, Rev and Mrs Dakin, lived in Memphis and he and his mother spent many summers with them when he was a boy. He wrote and staged his first plays there, with neighborhood kids.
Schlitz is the best name for beer. You take "lit" — a synonym for drunk — and you surround it with letters that evoke drunken slurred speech.
WTF? No spoiler alert?
Inconsiderate.
Etymology of beers. Only on Althouse.
"Schlitz is the best name for a beer."
I've always liked the onomatopoeic quality of Blatz.
I've seen 5 from his list: Husbands, Children of Paradise, Magnificent Ambersons, Angel at My Table, and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
I've tried to watch Days of Heaven, but I've stalled somewhere near the beginning more than once.
Her religious torments? I was taught Southern Women's Fiction by the best scholar in the field. "Torments" is in no way the correct description. The role her faith played in her life was not a torment: it was a moral, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual journey, and even saying that is to over-simplify the subject in respect to her lofe and work. Please, enough with the knee-jerk ignorance about the precepts and practice of a lived Catholic life.
I'm surprised, Narr, that she's not more up your alley. She's not Carson McCullers.
Flannery O'Connor's The Habit of Being, a collection of letters, was important to me in my late 20s. I had loved her stories and my Southern Baptist soul connected strongly with her spiritual being. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover she was a Catholic. Anyhow, her lupus kept her homebound with her beloved peacocks, making correspondence a huge part of her social life. She had a wonderful sense of humor. Upon rereading her fiction, I discovered how funny O'Connor's stories are. I didn't get much of the lighthearted humor from that movie trailer.
Wow! A new movie I actually want to see. Thank you, Althouse.
I'll watch for Wildcat. Thanks!
O'Connor's body was tortured by lupus, but her faith was fine. She attended mass at Sacred Heart church in Milledgeville, and she read Thomas Aquinas every night before bed. She called herself a Hillbilly Thomist.
I devoured her stories, essays, and letters when I was young. She wrote about human nature and divine grace, and she deliberately wrote stories to startle and shock readers into new insights.
I've seen Wildcat a couple of times now, including a NYC screening with Ethan Hawke doing a Q & A afterwards (not with audience members, unfortunately, but with a guy from IndiWire).
It's an interesting movie, a unique structure and Maya is very good as Flannery (although her accent is not right. There is a recording of Flannery reading "A Good Mann is Hard to Find," and you can hear.)
The Hawkes have done quite a bit of Catholic-centered media on the film and are very serious about it, especially Maya (whose interest in Flannery sparked the project). I give it an A for effort and intention, but a B- for execution, for a couple of reasons.
The dramatizations of the stories, cast with Maya and Linney as the leads that "match" the characters of Flannery and her mother Regina, nd up giving a reductive understanding of the stories and O'Connor's process. And a couple of them are just...not good and pretty much miss the point of the stories
Secondly, as seriously as the Hawkes take Flannery's faith their final understanding of what she was about skims the surface. Flannery was all about artfully recreating the reality of what she saw around her but what Wildcat doesn't communicate is that this reality is about more than the social morays and quirks of those around her. What she *saw* was the incredible drama of redemption being played out around here, and the human resistance to that offer of grace and redemption - a resistance so strong it might just require us to be bonked on the head with a book or have a gun put to our heads (every day of our lives) to open up to it.
And this, as you know if you read her letters and her essays, was elemental from the beginning.
There are dots to that effect in Wildcat but they're not connected. I enjoyed it, and I'll see it again when it comes to my area in a couple of months, but my final conclusion is that someone seeing this film would *still* not understand why O'Connor sent her first collection of stories to a friend with the note: "Nine stories about Original Sin, with my compliments,"
If you want, you can read more here:
https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2024/05/08/the-world-of-guilt-and-sorrow/
Some scenes from Wildcat were filmed at our railroad museum and around the small towns in the area. I wasn't able to work the shoot but reports from the guys that were there indicated Hawke and his production team were quite reasonable and professional.
Coincidentally, although I'd never even heard of O'Connor until a few days ago, this morning I'm using her typewriter of choice, a 1930s Remington Noiseless portable.
Flannery O'Connor was a name that I was familar with as a Southern writer but knew nothing about. Thought Flannery was a man's name. I like Carson McCullers, so perhaps I'll give Flannery a try.
I'll also give the film a try if it crosses my path.
Christopher B -
My daughter lives in Louisville - she's an attorney but also sells vintage things online - and sold the prop dept one of the typewriters they used!
She called me a year and a half ago and said, "There's a movie with Ethan Hawke filming around here that wants to buy one of my typewriters...it's called Wildcat."
And having no idea about this film, we assumed it was some historical tale of Kentucky sports....and then a few months later, I figured it out. Crazy, especially considering my passion for Things Flannery. So I'm practically in the movie, I guess.
Also, they had a local priest consult for the religious material/scenes, and he's the priest in the film. He had very positive experiences with the whole crew as well.
https://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.php?ID=195579
I feel like I have a connection to Ethan Hawke, because my son once looked so much like Ethan Hawke in "Training Day" that it was frightening--I saw the character as my son, especially as I could see him getting caught up in the same way the character did.
In "Revelation," the college girl who despises main character Mrs. Turpin was supposedly an angel, according to O'Connor (diary? interview? letter?). An angel delivering a message to the other character. Since the angel was at least as, if not more, repugnant in her pride, smugness and hatred than Mrs. Turpin, I questioned whether this could be true or was a misunderstanding of the characters. But that's what the author S A I D, the group leader responded in consigning my disagreement to Upper Slobovia. So that's what it was, no debate possible.
What if the author had it wrong? What if her own writing gave the lie to such a conscious plan of characterization? O'Connor, if she did identify with the college girl, might have been partly blinded to the equally (or more) repugnant nature of her stand-in. Mrs. Turpin's smugness was on a relatively small scale of social interactions, locally; and was balanced by a certain amount of doing and effort. The college girl was just a discontented know-it-all.
This relates to the post a couple weeks ago about how much authors and artists understand their own work. Are they the final word on what they created? In my book, no. In fact, far from it. Did Hemingway know how repugnant his male characters could become as he paraded their masculinities around the pages? I don't think so. I think a certain amount of unconscious truth-telling from an artist is not only possible but probable. I don't know how well the visual arts fit that idea, but I think many visual artists would be unable to tell you just what prompted some of their creation. Because it was tactile, immediate, sensory, and the product of an unconscious set of affinities. Art contains mystery, not merely a simple plan.
For years I could only recall one name of this tandem.. If I thought of Carson McCullers, I could not recall the other one and vice-versa. Perhaps it would be more truthful to say that I could not recall the pair of them immediately. After soul searching and mind dredging the other name would finally bubble up to the surface. This was particularly perplexing because I had studied Southern Writers almost as minor minor and then continued to root through lesser southern writers through the years.
I'm looking forward to seeing this. Both of these women had health issues and very stern outlooks on life. If the idea is an A I'd give a B- execution a high rating. Better than an F idea and an A+ presentation.
Flannery O'Connor is a Great American Writer, one of the best short story writers of the English language. She's a spellbinding storyteller and her prose is imaginative, vivid and inventive, and similar in sense and style to the darkly humorous poetry of Charles Baudelaire.
Thank you for this post, Althouse. For thinking of Flannery O'Connor and Ethan Hawke and his daughter and Schlitz Playhouse and Gene Kelly and Agnes Moorhead, an all the links and tags.
This is a good day to say thank you to all those ladies that we take for granted every day. Thank you Althouse for serving us something to chew on every day in your virtual coffehouse.
Happy Mother's Day!
Wim Wenders is a great German director of the same vintage as Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, etc.
His Ripley (based on Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game) movie, The American Friend staring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz is an all time classic gritty art film noir from 1977. Cameos by influential directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller.
Speaking of Ripley, has a Ripley mini series. In black and white, the cinematography and sound design are exquisite. At first I did not like the actor who played Ripley but I kept going with it and it turned out to be an all-time performance. It's full of great character actors at the top of their game.
Created written and directed by Steven Zaillian.
HBO Max has his mini series "The Night of" which is kind of sort of like an extended episode of law and order only a million times better.
Kai Akker said...
"This relates to the post a couple weeks ago about how much authors and artists understand their own work. Are they the final word on what they created? In my book, no. In fact, far from it. Did Hemingway know how repugnant his male characters could become as he paraded their masculinities around the pages?"
I don't see how a reader's reaction to the book has any effect on the writer's meaning behind their work. You might look at Hemingway characters and think they are masculine and repugnant, while a man from another culture might see them as weak and feminine. I imagine Hemingway would be taken aback by either interpretation.
In one of her stories a juvenile delinquent tells a social worker that he may be good but he's not right. This sentiment has affected a lot of my opinions.
She takes after Uma more than Ethan and that may be a good thing. I loved GATTACA. I used to live across the street from the Marin County Civic Center, and I would visit the library every week. I would try to find the areas where they filmed different GATTACA scenes. Sigh, I wish California wasn’t so fucked up, I would never have left.
Here's how you remember the difference: O'Connor was a genius of the James Joyce/Faulkner scale. McCullers was a pulp fiction writer.
Christopher B.: where were the shoots?
In order of seniority, the iconic Southern woman writers are Welty, McCullers, and O'Conner.
(I haven't paid much attention since.) All their beauty was on the inside.
Who now remembers guys like T.S. Stribling, Peter Taylor, or Jesse Hill Ford? Harry Harrison Kroll?
Narr said...
In order of seniority, the iconic Southern woman writers are Welty, McCullers, and O'Conner...
Who now remembers guys like T.S. Stribling, Peter Taylor, or Jesse Hill Ford? Harry Harrison Kroll?
5/12/24, 6:49 PM
Eudora Welty is a great writer, underrated, there is a poetic rhythm to her writing and her prose is an interesting and original. I read Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, don't remember it much one or the other, but that's a small sample and a long time ago. I know I reread books I loved from years ago and often I think, Hmmmm, Is that all there is?
Flannery O'Conner is one of the two Great American Short Story writers of the 20th Century: Flannery O'Connor and Bernard Malamud.
I read a Peter Taylor book, I remember nothing of it. Same with Walker Percy, although I do remember the title of the Percy book, The Moviegoer, and that there were parts that had me contemplating, and I was pretty young then and not prone to contemplating. Is Capote considered a Southern writer?
Kayaker: you are correct. Once the artist produces a work it belongs to the world and the world will do with it what it wants any interpretation is subject to the whims of the masses.
As far as Hemingway goes, I find it ironic that his characterization of the most masculine role model of an ideal man had his balls blown off. For his sins he gets to see the love of his life being Rogered by other men, one great, most inferior.
"Flannery O'Connor is a Great American Writer, one of the best short story writers of the English language. She's a spellbinding storyteller and her prose is imaginative, vivid and inventive, and similar in sense and style to the darkly humorous poetry of Charles Baudelaire."
And I am Marie of Roumania.
Also Breece D'J Pancake. Ellen Gilcrist. Eudora Welty. Truman Capote. McCullers was a circus act, but why deny the richness of these other writers?
@Howard, I agree (possibly!) with you that the first two Hemingways were his best books. By a long, long way. His hopelessly conflicted feelings about masculinity bedeviled him in life and work. The characters, of both genders, began losing their credibility, for me, after those two. Some of the men were insecure and the objects of the author's contempt, so long as they were not his own stand-ins. Some overcompensated. He eventually came to seem lost in his own myths, mythos, and genetics. IMO.
@Michael Fitzgerald -- Nothing Hemingway ever heard from a reader would have surprised him much. That still doesn't gainsay the problems he eventually had with characterizations.
My larger point on the writers was this-- a writer may tell the truth in his or her prose and yet may still have had the "intention" to have delivered a different meaning. They can tell the truth despite themselves.
No, Kai Akker, you are conflating your own feelings with the intent of an author's work, an intent which you have no possible way of knowing. Further, you suggest that a writer doesn't know what is written until the reader tells him. It's not the "truth" until Kai Akker says so....🙄 JFC, you people think the world of yourself.
Jupiter said...
"Flannery O'Connor is a Great American Writer, one of the best short story writers of the English language. She's a spellbinding storyteller and her prose is imaginative, vivid and inventive, and similar in sense and style to the darkly humorous poetry of Charles Baudelaire."
And I am Marie of Roumania.
5/12/24, 8:56 PM
Show us your tits, bitch.
Yes, Capote grew up on the same street as Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama, when he wasn't being shuffled around other southern relatives. They were best friends. And I think he took her mess of a novel and dramatically re-wrote it for her.
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