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Richard Howarth recommends All God's Dangers:The Life of Nate Shaw

All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw
By Theodore Rosengarten
1974

Theodore Rosengarten was a young Harvard graduate student, a native of Brooklyn, New York, when he traveled to Alabama in 1969 to conduct research on Southern sharecroppers' unions of the 1930s. There he came across an eighty-four-year-old African-American man, Ned Cobb, who had been a member of a communist-originated union. As he probed Cobb with questions about his union involvement, he realized that this illiterate man had a remarkable capacity to recount the details and events of his life.

In 1971, Rosengarten returned to his subject with equipment to begin recording Cobb's life story. The transcription, edited down from fifteen hundred pages of material, became a six-hundred-page book entitled All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, published by Alfred Knopf in 1974. (Rosengarten changed Cobb's name in the book as a safety precaution.)

All God's Dangers earned immediate praise. The New York Times said that " . . . Rosengarten, the student, had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey and able to tell it with awesome intellectual power, with passion, with the almost frightening power of memory in a man who could neither read nor write but who sensed that the substance of his own life, and a million other black lives like his, were the very fiber of the nation's history."

Paul Gray, in Time, called the book "astonishing," and noted that "Miraculously, this man's wrenching tale sings of life's pleasures: honest work, the rhythm
of the seasons, the love of relatives and friends, the stubborn persistence of hope when it should have vanished. All God's Dangers is most valuable for its picture of pure courage."

Several reviews noted the "Faulknerian" quality of the narrative of Shaw-who was born twelve years before Faulkner and died ten years after him-and the Baltimore Sun commented that "Nate Shaw spans our history from slavery to Selma, and he can evoke each age with an accuracy and poignancy so pure that we stand amazed." In 1975 All God's Dangers earned the National Book Award.

The book has remained in print over the past thirty years, long a Vintage paperback and presently available from the University of Chicago Press. During that time, roughly the same as my own as a bookseller, I have been asked countless times to answer the same question, which always more or less comes in the form of "What one book would you say best explains the South?"

I have always answered it-usually standing right amidst the canon of Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty, and Wolfe, all in their beauteous Library of America editions, and in paperback aplenty, and To Kill a Mockingbird, All the King's Men, Black Boy, or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, not to mention the book of a personal hero, Walker Percy, author of the first great postmodern novel by a Southerner, need I say it, The Moviegoer, or the work of several notable writers who are also friends, Larry Brown, Ellen Douglas, and Barry Hannah among them, and even a few newcomer gems such as Serena by Ron Rash or The Missing by Tim Gautreaux-I have always answered the question with the title whose mere utterance never fails to give a little thrill: All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw.

This question-What one book best explains the South?-usually begs the next: Why? Lots of reasons, many of which I have suggested, but in case not: the strength of the narrative and its epic story, the sheer beauty and honesty in the language, the uncanny detail about agriculture and animal husbandry, about mules, for heaven's sakes, about the economy of farming and of Shaw's time, including the Depression, about labor, class, and race-about race in a way that takes the reader to the heart of America's great, vexing issue-about family, power, and truth, and, perhaps most of all, about human dignity.

Though I do it all the time, I am sometimes annoyed to see "Southern literature" subcategorized, when doing so somehow seems to minimize its importance. All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw-let there be no misunderstanding-is a great American work of deep universal relevance and, for its readers, invariably, a source of astonishment and, indeed, reassurance that literature-even from an illiterate-is a thing of unsurpassing satisfaction.

Richard Howorth

Richard Howorth is the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, the bookstore he began in 1979. He served two terms as mayor of Oxford and is a former president of the American Booksellers Association. In 2008 he received the Authors Guild Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community.

Berry Bros. & Rudd

Berry Bros. & Rudd
Established in 1698
3 St. James's Street sw1
020 7396 9600; www.bbr.com

The most gracious shopping experience in London without doubt is a visit to Berry Bros. & Rudd, wine and spirit merchants to the Queen and the Prince of Wales, who have carried on business at their sublime lopsided premises since the seventeenth century. There is no finer place to buy a bottle of claret than in this unchanging shop, with its creaking uncovered floorboards, collection of ancient bottles, large set of beam scales, and the courteous service of yesteryear.

Peter Horrocks

Peter Horrocks, a barrister, is a freeman of the City of London. He is a former Chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, runs the Covent Garden Minuet Company, an 18th century dance group, is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and is a player of real tennis.

 

Famed for selling and sourcing the best wines, particularly claret, Berry Brothers gives equal attention to a highly rare case of Château Latour as it does to a single bottle of their famed Cutty Sark whisky. Behind the green-shuttered façade, the Victorian clerks' desks stand on the ancient undulating floor whilst on the scattered Georgian chairs clients quietly discuss their next purchase with the highly knowledgeable staff.

A huge old coffee scale on which most of fashionable London has been weighed since the eighteenth century still hangs in the shop, beside framed telegrams that include one gravely reporting the loss of a consignment of wine aboard the Titanic. Once their clients may have included Napoleon, countless European monarchs, and famous figures, but now they could equally include pop stars and shrewd dot-com millionaires.

Below the shop lie the cavernous cellars, rumoured to link with St. James's Palace by a lost tunnel, which now also play host to dinners and tastings for both private and corporate clients.

Jeremy Garfield-Davies

Jeremy Garfield-Davies is an architectural and art historian. A former director of Mallett in London and New York, he advises privately on the research, restoration and acquisition of works of art for some of the most important private and public collections worldwide. He is also currently co-writing the seminal book on the history of English gilt wood furniture.

Poet Mark Strand recommends The Russian Samovar

The Russian Samovar 
256 West 52nd Street between Broadway & Eighth Avenue
212 757-0168
www.russiansamovar.com

Roman Kaplan in front of his restaurant

When Joseph Brodsky was alive, he and I would often go to the Russian Samovar to drink and talk about poetry. It was always vodka-many flavors of it. Joseph would usually have cilantro. I would have cranberry. We talked and talked, stopping now and then to take large bites of smoked salmon, smoked sturgeon, pickled herring, usually with black bread. And the caviar we consumed! The food, like the vodka, was excellent. But what made the Russian Samovar special was its owner, Roman Kaplan, who knew Joseph before he came to this country. He is one of the warmest and most generous men that I have ever known. Whenever I go to New York, I go to the Russian Samovar, sit down, have some vodka, and talk with Roman. A gifted pianist plays sad Russian songs. Almost everyone in the restaurant is speaking Russian. Mikhail Baryshnikov, who is a part owner, is a frequent patron. Joseph hovers nearby.

Mark Strand

Mark Strand is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Man and Camel (2006); The Continuous Life (1990); and Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize. His many honors include the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

 

 

 

Songwriter Hugh Martin's love affair with the movies

Hugh Martin is best known for his score for the 1944 musical Meet Me In St. Louis.  Judy Garland sang three of his songs, The Trolley Song, The Boy Next Door, and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.  This is what he had to say in City Secrets Movies:

Passion (Madame DuBarry)
Ernst Lubitsch
1919

Broken Blossoms
D. W. Griffith
1919

The Last Flight
William Dieterle
1931

Love Me Tonight
Rouben Mamoulian
1932 

Applause
Rouben Mamoulian
1929

The Clock
Vincente Minnelli and Fred Zinnemann
1945

The Night of the Hunter
Charles Laughton
1955

The Good Fairy
William Wyler
1935

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Elia Kazan
1945

My love affair with movies began early-too early, as it turned out, because my first experience occurred when I was six years old, and it was a disaster. My poor, unsuspecting mother took me to see a silent movie called Passion. Pola Negri played Madame du Barry. When they dragged her to the guillotine she pleaded with the French revolutionaries for her life. "Don't kill me!" the title card screamed. "Life is so sweet!"

Now it was my turn to scream: convinced that I was right there, in the middle of the Place de la Bastille, I was carried out of the theater shrieking at the top of my lungs. Mother rushed me home, put me to bed, and phoned for the doctor, but all to no avail; I hollered for several hours.

Through the years I continued to over-respond. (In fact, I do so to this day.) But I learned to control myself sufficiently so that I didn't have to be removed-that was the last thing I wanted. In spite of my terror attack during Passion, a 1919 German film by director Ernst Lubitsch, I have never found a place more desirable than a movie theater.

Another silent film that made a lasting impression on me was D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919). This was-and is-a film of great richness. It is rich in beauty, as visually lovely as a lotus blossom. It is rich in emotion, too; the performances Griffith brought forth from Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess are more powerful than anything the screen offers today.

Moving into movies with sound, William Dieterle's first American film was The Last Flight (produced by First National in 1931). In an interview in the New York Times, Dieterle stated that regardless of all the awards lavished on him later, The Last Flight was the movie he believed to be his best. I agree wholeheartedly. We find Mr. Barthelmess again in this one, and his leading lady-the ethereally beautiful Helen Chandler-is every bit as sensitive as Ms. Gish. John Monk Saunders, a popular novelist of the 1920s, wrote the screenplay. His style is reminiscent of Hemingway, but I like him better. Hemingway goes for the jugular; Saunders goes for the heart.

The best musical of all time came from Paramount in 1932: Love Me Tonight. Director Rouben Mamoulian gave Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald a luster that sparkles as brightly today as it did then (if you can find a good print). Don't bother searching for better songs than those Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote for Maurice and Jeanette, because there are none. "Lover," "Isn't It Romantic?" and "The Son of a Gun is Nothing But a Tailor"-all of the songs are unsurpassable.

Another fine Mamoulian film is Applause (Paramount, 1929). I became addicted to Helen Morgan when she sang "Bill" in Show Boat, so Mamoulian's hunch that she had the making of a great dramatic actress thrilled and fascinated me. Her performance, under Mamoulian's loving direction, is shattering.

Only Judy Garland came closest to the place in my heart occupied by Helen Morgan. There's nothing esoteric about Judy's movies. Most of them were commercial as well as artistic blockbusters and need no help from me in attracting attention. However, The Clock (MGM, 1945) did become slightly lost in the shuffle. Too bad, because her acting had never been stronger. It was the second time she teamed with Vincente Minnelli, and he found depths of feeling in his wife (they married shortly after making The Clock) that none of her other work has quite matched. And Robert Walker's performance is equally good.

Charles Laughton directed only one movie, The Night of the Hunter (1955). It was received without excitement by critics, and this wounded Mr. Laughton so deeply that he never put on the director's hat again. Our loss, more than his. I find it a breathtakingly original film, with ingenious directorial touches and wonderful performances by Robert Mitchum, two splendid child actors, Shelley Winters, and the inimitable Lillian Gish. Good actresses don't die; they just get better.

Did you happen to see The Good Fairy? If you did, I don't have to tell you what a charmer it is. Preston Sturges wrote the screenplay in 1935 for Universal. He adapted it from a play by Ferenc Molnár, turning it into a vehicle for Margaret Sullavan. Although Sturges wasn't the director, it has many of the earmarks of a Sturges comedy masterpiece: the hilarious dialogue, the sweetness, and the stable of great character actors he loved to assemble (Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen, Alan Hale, Beulah Bondi, and Eric Blore). This is Morgan's best and funniest performance, and Herbert Marshall scores beautifully as the inamorato of Luisa Gingelbusher (Sullavan). William Wyler directed it with his usual skill and taste; Sturges himself couldn't have done it better.

Elia Kazan directed his share of blockbusters, but the film of his that I cherish the most is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). James Dunn, Dorothy McGuire, and Joan Blondell are superb; but it's the portrayal of young Francie by Peggy Ann Garner that knocks me out every time I watch it, year after year. With due respect to Judy Garland, Jackie Cooper, Margaret O'Brien, and Shirley Temple, I believe it to be the best juvenile performance ever.

Hugh Martin
Songwriter

 

Frank Stella recommends Sebastiano del Piombo's Flagellation of Christ

Sebastiano's Rome

 

Flagellation of Christ
c. 1521, Sebastiano del Piombo
Church of San Pietro in Montorio

In a letter attempting to explain his difficulties with a commissioned altarpiece, Rubens complained of a "perversi lumi." Bad light pervades the churches of Rome, yet sometimes it can be more of a blessing than a curse. Discovering a great painting all by oneself is a thrill that is hard to come by nowadays. Usually, the great paintings are thrown at us, overpresented and overlit, but a few are still somewhat hidden in their original settings, awaiting discovery. What light there is in these Roman churches has been mismanaged over the centuries, diminished by careless renovations. Not surprisingly, the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, just such a dark case, made for a perfect discovery. Pushing my son's stroller over a worn stone floor, I looked up into a reveal to catch a poorly defined aura, the afterglow of what had to be a special painting.

A late-winter afternoon in Rome is not the best time to stalk 16th-century church painting. It's very hard to find your prey. But that afternoon I did flush a great painting out of the Janiculum's shadow. I had no idea of its source. It looked like a Renaissance painting, but it easily could have been a copy, like the compositionally striking Caravaggio I had seen a few days before at the Palazzo Corsini, a fantastic Narcissus, easily the highlight of the collection. I had been very disappointed when my wife read the label of the Narcissus to me-a "copy after Caravaggio." I went into a deep sulk, wondering why I couldn't tell an original from a copy and why this copy was so good, because even confronted by its lack of authenticity, I still wanted it. To me it was a hot painting from the moment I saw it, maybe the hottest cool painting I had ever seen.

The painting in San Pietro in Montorio didn't have the boxy modernism of the Narcissus, but it did have a special kind of in-your-face classicism. It was an over-the-altar painting with mural power, one with "a tiger in its tank." My first guess was a conservative one, maybe after Giulio Romano; my second guess was, "I just don't know." I was surprised by the attribution to Sebastiano del Piombo, but not by the title, The Flagellation; the darkness was not so great that I couldn't make out the action.

Three months later I was there, again late in the afternoon, when the painting was perfectly lit, the seasonal angle of the sun being now in my favor. Sebastiano's painting was beautiful, inventive, and expansive. The beauty was all Sebastiano's, brought out by his Venetian gift for full-scale color, intensely articulated and swirling across the canvas from side to side and from top to bottom. Beauty brought out also by his paint-handling and form-building skills, so evident that Michelangelo, in Sidney Freedberg's words, had no reservations about selecting Sebastiano as his deputy in what amounted to a Medici-driven painting contest with Raphael.

The inventiveness in the painting owes something to Michelangelo's design, which allowed Sebastiano to run wild with a full-blown painterly classicism tinged opportunely with an innate piety. Painterly, pietistic classicism may sound strange, perhaps even at odds with itself, but it is a quality that really counted for a lot in the following hundred years of painting.

Finally, The Flagellation has a convincing expansiveness, an ability to make narrative action and gesture fill the pictorial boundaries to the point that they seem to swell and and bow out the framing edges. In a similar way, Sebastiano's work pushes painting itself beyond the confines of the 16th century into the 17th century. It is clear, too, that it was Sebastiano's brand of Roman painterly classicism that helped make the expansion so fluid and so far-reaching. He easily caught the attention of Caravaggio and Rubens, as we can see by their magnificent versions of the Flagellation. Certainly, this power-enhanced 16th-century Roman art had no trouble beaming itself out all over Italy and across Europe, led, for example, by Sebastiano's Flagellation to Naples and Antwerp. And it's equally certain that any painter, having seen the Roman light, perversi lumi as it could often be, was bound to follow its path all over Italy, and all across Europe, as the history of Western painting so clearly attests.

Frank Stella
Artist

Dany Levy recommends Doughnut Plant

Doughnut Plant

379 Grand Street between Essex & Norfolk Streets
212 505-3700
www.doughnutplant.com

Closed Monday.

 

 

Sandwiched between a thrift shop and a row of brick apartments, Doughnut Plant's storefront is easy to miss. But what lies within puts the franchise doughnut stores to shame.

One day, while sifting through boxes, Mark Isreal happened on some of his grandfather's recipes, so he whipped up a batch of doughnuts and tried selling them to his local coffee shop. The orders poured in literally overnight, and today Mark's doughnuts grace the counters at, among others, Dean & Deluca, Zabar's, and Balducci's. But for the real experience, head down to Grand Street and meet the man behind the doughnut.

This is not your average cop food. Flavors range from classic vanilla bean to ginger, lime, pistachio, and rose water, all hand-cut, hand-rolled, and fried in canola oil.

Best of all, each doughnut measures roughly the size of a human head. In the words of The New York Times' Florence Fabricant, "a plusher chocolate doughnut than his Valrhona would be hard to find."

Dany Levy
Founder of Daily Candy

Scott Simon recommends Additional Dialogue: The Letters of Dalton Trumbo

Additional Dialogue: The Letters of Dalton Trumbo

Edited by Helen Mafull
1970

 

Dalton Trumbo was an acerbic wit with a bristly moustache who was one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood (A Guy Named Joe, Kitty Foyle, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo), and a member of the Communist Party who refused to name names when commanded to the by House Un-American Activities Committee.

I will leave his literary reputation to film scholars (many point out that somehow he wrote his best films-Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave-under the pseudonyms he had to adopt during the blacklist). But this collection of letters establishes Trumbo as the most extraordinary and entertaining correspondent of all time.

He spent most of his best creative years living in a ranch many miles from the film factories of southern California, in exile in Mexico after he was blacklisted, and even in prison, where he spent eleven months for refusing to testify to the HUAC. The kind of creative effort other Hollywood writers might apply to studio meetings, lunches, and, for that matter, scripts they knew from experience would be substantially rewritten by others, Trumbo poured into magnificent letters that only he could send, to family, friends, contractors-even, at one point, to the man repairing his kitchen.

Some highlights: a missive sent to a hotel manager on why Trumbo felt entitled to swipe a room service coffeepot; a travel manual of sorts sent to his daughter, Melissa, about to embark on a trip to Europe, about the romantic dispositions of various European nationalities; and a hilariously detailed epistle to his son, Christopher, about to depart for college, on onanism and other solitary pursuits. There is a little lefty politics among the letters, which can now seem dated or naïve. But they are mostly letters written by a tenderhearted parent, husband, and friend to the people he cherishes most, and who cherish his wit and strength in adversity.

Scott Simon
Host, NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday 

Jim Jarmusch recommends They Caught The Ferry by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Ostensibly a government safety film, this short masterpiece very well may have paved the way for the tragic biker movie.  This is what Jim Jarmusch has to say in City Secrets Movies.

They Caught the Ferry
Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1948

It's true that the cinematic language spoken by Danish director Carl Dreyer (1889-1968) is one of the purest and most evocative of the form's history. (He's also one of my all-time hands-down favorite directors-right up there with Ozu, Vigo, Bresson, and Keaton.) But just to get things straight, Dreyer, in fact, does not fit neatly into the "purist aesthete" category where cinema history tries to contain him. Before directing he was a café pianist, a corporate bookkeeper, a tabloid journalist, and a balloon pilot. And let's not forget that his second feature was entitled Leaves from Satan's Book and that his third, The Witch Woman, was in essence a sex film. His next one, Chained (or The Story of the Third Sex), was about a man's internal torment over his homosexual urges (shades of Ed Wood!). Dreyer was also regarded as an obstinate brat and was a well-known pain in the ass to producers and financiers. This, of course, was due to his fanatical insistence on complete aesthetic control over his work.

In any case, by 1948 Dreyer, by then a true master, was having trouble securing financing for his feature projects (and had yet to deliver two of his greatest films-Ordet made in 1955 and Gertrud made in 1964). Auspiciously, the Danish government approached him (or maybe vice versa) to direct, of all things, a traffic-safety film for public-service purposes. Dreyer accepted the offer but decided to use a tragic motorcycle ride as his subject-therein unexpectedly creating what is possibly the very first Euro-biker movie.

Entitled They Caught the Ferry, it's now a rarely seen ten-minute black-and-white masterpiece and is only slightly disguised by its original intention. It's both a perfectly miniaturized youth horror film and the likely precursor to a subgenre of motorcycle flicks (including, among many others, The Wild One, Girl on a Motorcycle, Blonde in Black Leather, The Loners, and maybe even Easy Rider, since the bikers die in the end).

On another level, They Caught the Ferry could also be seen as a kind of thumbnail encapsulation of the tragic criminal-youth-on-the-run love-story genre, with Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night being my personal favorite. Just imagine They Live by Night transposed to a single motorcycle ride-the whole thing reduced to two wheels and minus the entire plot! Talk about cinematic purity.

Dreyer's jewel-like movie begins with a ferryboat docking, then various cars and motorbikes unload into a small city or town. Among the vehicles disembarking is the film's focus: a young couple on a motorcycle-she in the saddle behind, arms encircling him. And, as in all good biker movies, these two characters are "born to be bad" (even if only in a clean, 1948, Scando-trash kind of way). After all, they're on a motorcycle, they're not wearing helmets, and, if nothing else, they just drive way too fast.

The couple exits the town. She holds on even tighter as the bike flies down rural roads past trees and Scandinavian farmland. Daringly, they overtake cars and other motorcycles, barely avoiding farm animals in the process.

They arrive at a fork in the road and make a quick wrong decision, then have to turn around and accelerate back up to their previous breakneck speed. In the process, Dreyer employs a beautifully balanced variety of camera positions: shots from the bike, blurred POVs of the passing landscape, inserts of the vibrating needle on the speedometer, shots of their ecstatic faces intercut with the bike's spoked wheels spinning above the surface of the road . . . Breathtaking.

Then, eventually, their ecstasy hits a snag. The motorcycle catches up to a slow-moving, black, boxlike hearse-complete with an ominous skeleton painted on its rear doors. The bike makes several attempts to overtake the sinister hearse, but each time it is blocked. Dreyer carefully picks his moment to reveal the driver of the hearse-an emaciated ghoul clad in black, grinning maniacally from behind the wheel! Dr. D. the Reaper.

Accelerating wildly, they make yet another attempt to pass, but again the hearse swerves, intentionally forcing the motorcycle off the road. The bike catapults across a ditch, then slams head-on into a tree. Fade to black.

Fade up from black: the final shot of the film mimics its opening. This time, though, the ferryboat is preparing to depart. Two coffins have been loaded on. They contain the corpses of our young riders, making the return trip. Dead. They caught the ferry.

Jim Jarmusch
Director

Note: The original version has no accompanying music, instead effectively relying on variations of the motorcycle's engine to provide a "score" for the film. However, Tom Verlaine (guitarist extraordinaire and former leader of the legendary New York rock band Television) created a new score for They Caught the Ferry in 2000, which unfortunately I have not yet heard.

Editor's Note: The Danish band, Phonovectra, procured permission to use footage from They Caught the Ferry in their music video, "Too Young to Die." The video (which uses 3:26 minutes of the 11-minute short) can be viewed on YouTube under the title "Phonovectra-Too Young To Die."

 

Kenneth Turan recommends Taxi! by Roy Del Ruth

James Cagney speaks Yiddish in this wonderful movie recommended by LA Times and NPR film critic, Kenneth Turan.

Taxi!

Roy Del Ruth, 1932

 

Film historians call them simply "pre-Code." They're the unexpected movies made in Hollywood in the too-brief period between 1930 and 1934, between the birth of sound and the introduction of the suffocatingly moral Production Code. "More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards," writes Thomas Doherty in his book Pre-Code Hollywood. "They look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe." It's an upside-down world where, as shown in 1932's Taxi!, tough Irish street kid James Cagney speaks excellent Yiddish.

Cagney knew the language because it was the lingua franca of the streets he grew up on in the Yorkville neighborhood of  Manhattan. Cagney told biographer John McCabe that he especially liked Yiddish because "it's the one great language of vituperation . . . We Irish and German and other ethnic kids always envied our Jewish buddies their ability to insult." Cagney, playing cabdriver Matt Nolan, used Yiddish in conversations with Jack Warner and, according to McCabe, enjoyed referring to the studio head, in a particularly choice epithet, as a schvontz.

Knowing of the actor's gift for Yiddish, screenwriter John Bright crafted a scene in which Nolan, ordinarily feisty enough to start a fight, takes a few minutes off to help a desperate Jewish man who needs directions to Ellis Island so that he can meet his arriving wife. Cagney asks him, in excellent Yiddish, where he wants to go. When the astonished man asks if he is in fact Jewish, Cagney responds with a playful affirmative, "Vu den, a shaygetz?" ("What else, a Gentile?"). All done in the kind of fluent Yiddish even Jewish actors of today would have trouble matching.

Kenneth Turan
Film critic, Los Angeles Times

Anjelica Huston recommends Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch

Considered by some to be the ultimate post-modern western, this movie has an incredible cast, a score by Neil Young and plenty of references to the poet William Blake to boot.

Dead Man
Jim Jarmusch
1995

A sadly overlooked film, stunningly photographed by Robby Müller, Dead Man is an inspired take on the Western tradition. With brilliant performances by Johnny Depp, Billy Bob Thornton, and Mili Avital.

Anjelica Huston
Actress