Women Journalists From England

"For Mr. Astaire, along with Chaplin and Disney, is one of the only really significant trio that the cinema has yet evolved. These three are universal artists, at once masters and servants oi form which the whole world can assess and appreciate. It is possible that Chaplin his time, and Disney at the present, is the completer artist. It doesn't matter, Evaluations of this kind are little more than academic exercises, a sterile study, a conscript thesis. The important fact that Astaire, with his dancing, like Chaplin with his clowning and Disney with his drawing, has found a way of expressing an idea, a feeling, or even clean and acute perception of physical well-being, to millions of people who cannot follow his steps, understand his songs, or speak his language."

"If Mr. Hitchcock would rid himself of the delusion that it is enough for an artist to give perfect expression of any subject—the feelings of a cat sitting on a garbage can, the smell of over-ripe bananas in a broken basket on a dusty street—he would become a film producer of considerable merit in the world. He has originality. He has a fine economy of detail. He has made himself independent of words with a strongly developed pictorial sense. Some day he may surprise us all, and himself among the number, by making a picture that is as good in its conception as in its execution. And when Hitchcock sets to work on real film material, real artist's material, there will not be more than half a dozen producers in the world who will be able to beat him. There are none in England now."

"For the kinema must please the women or die. The vast majority of picture-goers are women and always will be. The time o day is in their favour, to steal an odd hour from me afternoon; and woman, whose work lies at home, just as glad of the opportunity to escape from home for an hour us ma, whose work lies outside, is glad of the opportunity to be in it. The price too, is a woman's price, easily found. When a man spends money, he likes to feel he is spending; when a woman spends money, she likes to feel she is not."

"But the main attraction of the kinema for women rises out of a common factor in their natures. Woman is desperately personal, and the kinema the most personal of all the arts. Through it a woman can get into close touch with the shadows she has longed to meet, can seem to know them, can follow them through the whole gamut of their moods and share with them the most intense experiences. For women and because of women the "star" system has grown up in the kinema. It is nothing more or less than a commercial means of giving women the most of what they want—personality."

"A Night at the Opera, which is, oddly enough, quite largely about a night at the opera, seems to be the best of all the Marx Brothers pictures so far. It has more movie sense if you can call any Marxian manifestation sense; than any of its predecessors; it is better cut, better presented, has better gags, and the emphasis is more evenly distributed among the brothers. Groucho, whom the microphone has always distorted unfairly, is tuned down and slowed up a little to the level of his stage performance; Harpo's zany act is better assimilated, and Chico, for whom I have always had a sneaking preference, comes out more strongly than in the earlier pictures."

"A book could be written if Harpo didn't eat it first, or Groucho and Chico tear it up page by page on the art of the Marxes. You could call it surrealism, or or dadaism, or what about that -ism that all depends on the use of staircases? You could analyse its clear cold illogic, entirely divorced from emotion. You could suggest that Harpo, with his motor horn, is in the direct line of the clowns of history. You could even argue that it represents the furthest manifestation of, pure comedy on the modern screen, and you wouldn't be far wrong."

"[On the new CinemaScope process] The effect produced on the viewer is to make him feel he is sitting inside a monster pillar-box looking out through the slot at a world in the rough proportions of a dachshund. For views of processions, or wide horizontal sweeps of plain or water this does not work out badly, but it comes hard-on actors who have to 'exchange confidences from the opposite, sides of a proscenium arch."

"From the imaginative point of view, the Fellini is a masterpiece of its kind. I hasten to add that it is a very dreadful kind. I should not like to send anyone to see the picture unprepared. [In] La Dolce Vita ... [s]ome of the scenes are the most sickening exhibitions of human degradation and depravity ever shown on a public screen. They are intended to he so, for Fellini is a rebel who feels bitterly about the spurious sweetness of the dolce vita. The leading character is a gossip-writer on a scandal sheet ... smelling out sensation. Wherever the scent is rankest, there he goes, with a pack, of other velping photographers at his heels. The wildest of wild orgies, a fake miracle, suicide following a father's murder of his sleeping children, the public striptease of a middle-aged woman to celebrate the annulment of her marriage, all these find our hero in attendance. Why should anybody choose see it? Because it is a work of deep imagination, signed with an artist's individual hand. The black-and-white photography is masterly. Everything Fellini's camera touches springs to urgent life. He can pour life suddenly Into an empty street, illumine some hitherto unnoticed figure and make it live and breathe. No comer of the huge screen is ever wasted. Space left blank is as deliberately significant as space filled."

"[Recalling The Mark of Zorro (1920)] Suddenly, as I watched [[w:Douglas Fairbanks|[Douglas] Fairbanks]]' harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. Why should I not turn my pleasure into profit, and earn my living by seeing films? The profession of film criticism had not yet come into being ... An extra deterrent was the fact that women had very little standing yet as journalists."

"I couldn't give away the ending if I wanted to, for the simple reason that I grew so sick and tired of the whole beastly business that I didn't stop to see it. Your edict may keep me out of the theatre, my dear Hitchcock, but I'm hanged if it will keep me in."

"It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom (Plaza). This so-called entertainment is directed by Michael Powell, who once made such distinguished films as A Matter of Life and Death and 49th Parallel."

"I don't propose to name the players in this beastly picture."

"A new film by Alfred Hitchcock is usually a keen enjoyment. Psycho turns out to be an exception. There follows one of the most disgusting murders in all screen history. It takes place in a bathroom and involves a great deal of swabbing of the tiles and flushings of the lavatory. It might be described with fairness as plug ugly."

"Oliver Twist (Odeon, Marble Arch) is the third of the Dickens novels to be filmed, with conscious solicitude, in this country; and while it is obviously very much better than Nicholas Nlckleby, I cannot think it as good a picture as Great Expectations. Possibly the fault lies in the choice of subject: for Oliver Twist, let us face it, is a pretty ugly story. ... And while it is one thing to read about the violent and vicious and sordid experiences that attended the progress of the poor-house boy, it is quite another to see them acted. The only essential difference between Oliver Twist and the modern gangster tale is that the former is written superlatively well."

"The Cineguild director and producer, David Lean and Ronald Neame, have spared us nothing of the brutality of Oliver Twist. All the ugliness is there: the filth and cold, humiliation and hunger; the thrashing of Oliver; the savage beating to death of Nancy; the special lust which Dickens describes in italics as "the passion for hunting something." All these things are realistically set out in the film in pictures as remorseless as a Cruikshank drawing. The producers have even added two special savageries of their own; an introduction in which Oliver's mother is seen battling through the storm in the last pangs of travail, and a climax in which the child is forced to climb to the chimney-stack and watch Bill Slkes hang himself. The introductory scene, as it happens, is magnificently done; the roof-tops sequence seems to me both distasteful and silly."

"It is an odd and somewhat ironic commentary on the entertainment of the times that the best, happiest, most intelligent and human picture of the week, I was about to say of the year, should be a murder story. But so it is: The Naked City (Gaumont and Marble Arch) is a thriller and a beauty."

"I have never made any secret of my distaste for films concerned with the glorification of the spiv, and I must declare al once that Brighton Rock, the new British film at Warners, is not my notion of entertainment. Graham Greene's savage storv about a couple of race-course gangs and their fancy ways with a razor is one of the most brutal things I have seen on the screen since They Made Me a Fugitive... Once having made this point clear, I have nothing but the highest praise for the way in which the film has been done. Brighton Rock is a splendid bit of picture-making. I do not think that for direction and all-round performance it could have been excelled by the work of any other country. ... [The Boulting Brothers] have taken the audience triumphantly behind the front of Brighton in the holiday season, into an underworld as subtle as the Casbah, where sleazy-lodging houses bed shameful secrets, and a youth can become a seasoned murderer at seventeen."

"They have not only given us a first-class detective story but they have added the suggestion that this sort of thing might impinge on any one of us, unknowingly, on our way home from business; but would not in the end affect a community armoured with life and decency, private concerns, family responsibilities, mealtimes, bedtimes, train schedules and sunlight. The film has been shot almost entirely, and most magnificently shot, in the streets, homes, stores, and Government departments of New York, and I have never seen a picture that expressed more fundamentally the difference between the extraordinary person who practises crimes of violence, and the normal, blessedly ordinary person who doesn't. The Naked City is at once keen observation and grand filmmaking."

"De Beauvoir believed that the advent of private property was what had "dethroned" women; Saini argues that the causes of patriarchy are more complex, but identifies the rise of the first states as a significant turning point."

"It was in 1680 that the English political theorist Sir Robert Filmer defended the by arguing in his ' that the state was like a family, meaning kings were effectively the fathers and their subjects, the children. The royal head of state was the ultimate earthly patriarch, ordained by God, whose authority went back to the patriarchs of biblical times. In Filmer's vision of the universe—an obviously self-serving one for an aristocrat—patriarchy was natural. It began small, in people's families, with the father having dominion over his household, and ended large, marbled through institutions of politics, law, and religion."

"If you were a geek growing up, you'll recognize how lonely it can be. If you were the female geek, you'll know it's far lonelier. By the time I reached my final years of school, I was the only girl in my chemistry class of eight students. I was the only girl in my mathematics class of about a dozen. And when I decided to study engineering at university, I found myself the only woman in a class of nine."

"The power hierarchy had white people of European descent sitting at the top. They believed themselves to be the natural winners, the inevitable heirs of great ancient civilizations. There are still many today who look at the world and imagine that the imbalances and inequalities we see are natural, that white Europeans have some innate superiority that allowed them to conquer and take the lead, and that they will have it forever. They imagine that only Europe could have been the birthplace of modern science, or that only the Europeans could have conquered the Americas."

"[T]he Farage approach, much like that of Boris, is not only fun for the man, it seems to be just as fun for the woman."

"But increasingly "gender critical feminist" is simply becoming another term for members of the public who are not willing to put up with this madness."

"I'm petrified of driving, but what about flying? It’s now cheaper and more reliable than taking the train to Manchester or Newcastle."

"Anti-black racism rightly gets a lot of attention. But perhaps it's time to figure out where Jews fit into the picture because, as the Tuck report makes clear, our struggles are just as real as those facing other minorities."

"Everyone has the right to say or do what they like within the law, but that doesn't change my conviction – which is considered as extreme as it is obvious to me – that anti-Israel Jews are worse than antisemitic: they are traitors. If their lives were at stake, and Israel was the one place in the world they might be safe, Israel's duty would be to take them in because they are Jews. But to me, now, whatever rituals they perform, they are useless Jews. Superfluous. In the enemy camp, working against all who believe "never again"."

"Despite this near-impossible battlefield, the IDF seems to have managed to keep its ratio of civilians to combatants killed lower than almost any other army ever has. The world eats up Hamas figures for the numbers who have been killed, naturally refusing to distinguish between Hamas fighters and civilians. But according to one analysis earlier this year, even if we accept the terror group's statistics, for every Hamas combatant eliminated, approximately 1.5 civilians have been tragically killed. Given that the UN says that civilians usually make up a shocking 90 per cent of casualties in war (a 1:9 ratio), this is impressive. Unlike most, Israel drops leaflets and sends texts to people before any attacks so they can evacuate; in this war, it has sacrificed some of its objectives in order to limit civilian deaths."

"The America of my childhood was not a place where Jews had to brace themselves for constant invocations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where Jewish excellence in entertainment triggered public mockery laced with canards about Jewish control, as in Dave Chappelle's monologue. And, on the left, it was not a place where being pro-Israel was seen to be a position of "white supremacy" — a crime, in the new American progressive universe, deemed far worse than antisemitism."

"[From an article on Kanye West's admiration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.] It's hard to believe that this is all happening in the country of my childhood — a place where light antisemitism sometimes marred small Waspy towns like the one I grew up in, or circulated within certain communities, but didn’t dominate the ether. On the contrary. Crucially, there was a sense, an awareness, that Jews were an indispensable addition to American showbiz — and America was lucky to have them. The idea that celebrities, from comedy to music and sport (the NBA's Kyrie Irving recently promoted a terrifying book called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America) might weekly spew some new Goebbels-grade sentiment would have seemed dystopian."

"I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened."

"The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness."

"I am sometimes bored by people, but never by life."

"If somebody could write a book for people who never read they would make a fortune."

"This is a tragic story, from start to finish. The imperial over-reach of a handful of trans activists, in trying to rewrite widely accepted ideas about gender by stealth, has done nothing to improve the lives of trans people. The time wasted by Stonewall and other organisations, which have spent more than a year chasing a legal change that wasn’t even a priority for those interviewed by the inquiry."

"Those two words—values and competence—are key to Starmer's plan to remake Labour. Britain's Jewish community is small—0.5 percent of the population—but the issue of anti-Semitism cut through more broadly in the general election. To many Jewish voters, the party’s failure to expel anti-Semitic conspiracists and cranks has been personally painful, even frightening. To the wider electorate, it sent out the message that Corbyn was either complicit or incompetent. Neither is an attractive proposition when choosing a prime minister."

"It is still shocking to me that Miller could be so little versed in feminism that she could sign off a report advising a change to the Equality Act, replacing “gender reassignment” with “gender identity” as a protected characteristic, without realising the profound public policy implications of that change. At a stroke, she advised changing our concept of gender from something that is partially socially constructed – how you are treated – to entirely a matter of internal essence. She entered the realm of metaphysics, asserting that everyone has a gender identity, something which no instrument can measure. That isn’t the kind of thing you can casually toss out in paragraph 4.108 and expect everyone to nod through, unless you have no idea what you’re proposing."

"Another adjective often attached to Sturgeon is feminist. When the Conservative prime minister Theresa May visited Scotland in 2016, Sturgeon tweeted a photograph of the two women shaking hands, with the words "Politics aside—I hope girls everywhere look at this photograph and believe nothing should be off limits for them." The majority of Sturgeon’s cabinet is female, as is her chief of staff. She is adored by a generation of young female activists: the SNP store once sold EAT, SLEEP, NICOLA, REPEAT T-shirts."

"But you can’t identify your way out of the gender pay gap. Biological females are a class of people who face discrimination too, and there has been little attempt during this process to listen to their concerns."

"Sturgeon's second challenge comes from debates over the rights of transgender women—an issue that is also causing disquiet and dissent among progressives across the world, including in the United States. In 2019, she received an open letter from women in her own party who claimed they were unable to discuss their rights without being called transphobic bigots. The other side accuses her of not doing enough to crack down on all those transphobic bigots. (In January, Sturgeon posted an unscripted video on Twitter, begging young activists who "consider at this stage the SNP not to be a safe, tolerant, or welcoming place for trans people" to stick with her party.)"

"[N]othing about that Senate circus was fair on Kavanaugh or Blasey Ford. It was pure theatre. The FBI "investigation" which followed it was a sham. It could not have been clearer that the Republicans wanted to keep the allegations unresolved, and use them as a wedge issue: hasn’t the pendulum swung too far? Where’s the evidence? It’s his word against hers! Perhaps they suspect that a proper investigation would produce evidence that would have disqualified Kavanaugh, or perhaps they believe him to be innocent, but preferred a quick confirmation to a slow exoneration. Either way, their cynicism is demoralising. The vagueness of #MeToo has helped victims come out (it’s easier to say "me too" than the more stark "I was raped" or "this man harassed me"). The phrase has helped the public discussion to stay "polite", avoiding too much talk of brutality and bodily fluids. But that vagueness is also a drawback, smudging together mere thoughtless entitlement with violence and coercion."

"Given all the effort feminists have invested in making language more equitable, you might expect that they would welcome use of the term pregnant people. But some, including me, are concerned that it obscures the social dynamics at work in laws surrounding contraception, abortion, and maternal health. The argument for the second wave’s language changes was that women fought fires in the exact same way as men, so one word should cover both sexes. That’s a different decision from whether we should keep gendered language to reflect heavily gendered experiences."

"The immediate consequences are obvious: a Labour government with a commanding majority but a demoralizing inbox, and an opposition that will spend the next few days asking what the hell went wrong, the next few months wondering what to do next, and the next few decades arguing over who was to blame. The only consolation for the Conservatives will be to conclude that this was not a defeat for their ideology so much as a punishment for their incompetence."

"With the pistols, my shots pulled down from the recoil or the weight. But the AR‑15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the shots skipped out of it and into the center of the target. I felt like I was in Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn. Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis’s Florida."

"After being raised Catholic, I became interested in New Atheism in the 2000s, because it was a countercultural phenomenon. Like pretty much everyone else, I would argue that my political beliefs are all carefully derived from first principles. But the ones that I choose to write about publicly are clearly influenced by my own self-image as an outsider and a contrarian. Being self-aware about that helps me remember that my fear of normiedom has to be kept in check, because the conventional wisdom is often right."

"When I think back over the most memorable parts of Dahl's work, it's always the nastiness that lingers. ... The awful married couple at the center of The Twits subject each other to a campaign of relentless psychological harassment. The message of George’s Marvelous Medicine is "Why not brew up all the chemicals you can find in your house and feed the resulting concoction to your grandmother?" This is not an easy fit for an era when peanut packets carry a warning that they contain nuts."

"Dahl's novels share many of their flaws with the books of Ian Fleming, born eight years earlier and a survivor of the same vicious public-school system. The writers knew each other, from their mutual involvement in wartime espionage, and their estates pose the same problem: They are money machines, but the original works embarrass their current owners. Fleming's James Bond was a suave misogynist prone to slapping women and making disparaging remarks about "Chinamen." Today's audiences would recoil from that version of 007."

"Perhaps a comparison will help. The same progressives who push for pregnant people have no problem saying “Black Lives Matter”—and in fact decry the right-wing rejoinder that "all lives matter." Yet, hopefully, all lives do matter—and about half of the people shot by U.S. police are white. So why insist on Black? Because the phrase is designed to highlight police racism, as well as the disproportionate killing of Black men in particular. Making the slogan more "inclusive" also makes it useless for political campaigning. Pregnant people does the same. The famous slogan commonly attributed to the second-wave activist Florynce Kennedy—"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament"—would be totally defanged if it were made gender-neutral. And if we cannot talk about, say, the Texas abortion law in the context of patriarchal control of women's bodies, then framing the feminist case against such laws becomes harder. No more "men making laws about women." Instead we get: "Some people who are in charge of policy want to restrict the rights of some other people. We oppose that because people’s rights are human rights!""

"That this play is at the Globe, the home of Shakespeare, only underscores that it is not in the Shakespearean tradition. The great English playwright is still revered today because he drove the possibilities of drama forward, creating characters with psychological depth and ambiguity. I, Joan is part of an older tradition, the medieval morality play. These pitted virtues and vices against one another for the soul of the protagonist: Greed and Sloth raged against Chastity and Patience. In I, Joan, that conflict has given way to one between Cisnormativity and Authenticity. I, Joans supporting characters exist not as people but as conduits for the moral lesson being delivered to the audience."

"What the government proposes is a radical rewriting of our understanding of identity: now it’s a question of an internal essence — a soul, if you will. Being a woman or a man is now entirely in your head. In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a women’s changing room?"