Ray Olson

Latest by Ray Olson in Chronicles

• Reviews

  July 2015

  Cathedral of the World

  I first encountered the poetry of B.H. Fairchild when I chose to review Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2003).

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• Blog

  January 9, 2015

  More On Noir and Two Additional Silents You Should See

  One responder to my previous post, “Notes on noir”, asked why so many movies are called film noir when, by my lights, they’re not. The simple, somewhat cheeky answer is “brand creep”: film noir is a bankable label for a crime movie, so it’s come to be liberally applied.

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• Blog

  November 20, 2014

  Notes on Noir

  I’m watching lot of film noir lately, from the 1940s (the style persisted through the 1950s, so there’s much more to be seen), and wondering about noir in general. What is “pure” film noir? Why is film noir so enduringly popular?

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• Blog

  September 5, 2014

  Fritz Lang’s Liliom: Less Catholic, still Christian?

  On February 7, 2011, Art Livingston posted to this blog a discussion of the early Hollywood talkie, Liliom (1930), based on the play of the same name by the popular and prolific early-twentieth-century Hungarian dramatist, Ferenc Molnár.

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• Blog

  August 6, 2014

  Why you should see the silents, part II

  It’s all very well to say, as I do, that you should see the silents because in them you will see every development in film style—except synchronized sound—freshly created and, in most cases, as artfully exploited as they ever have been. But the proof is in the viewing.

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• Blog

  July 22, 2014

  Why you should see the silents, part I

  Silent movies are to movies in toto as classical Greek and Roman drama is to all of European drama.

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• Blog

  June 16, 2014

  The Big Change

  Because the movies are a by-product of modern technology, it’s understandable that significant changes in the medium are presumed to be technological. Sound, color, and digital recording are the usual suspects for having caused cataclysmic upheaval.

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• Blog

  April 24, 2014

  Kurosawa begins

  Whenever the president of the Rockford Institute and I chat about movies, the conversation always runs into the brick wall of the Japanese cinema.

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• Blog

  March 28, 2014

  Love stories for guys

  I’d long wanted to see more Raoul Walsh movies. Renowned as an action specialist and he-man director without peer, Walsh made every kind of adventure film—war, western, swashbuckler, gangster, fantasy (the Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad), naval, bandit (Carmen twice!), even biblical—during his 51-year career.

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• Blog

  March 7, 2014

  With DVD and Remote in Deepest Filmland

  Remember Nick and Nora Charles, the movies’ Thin Man and wife? Of course, you do.

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• Reviews

  May 2013

  A Sticker in Kentucky

  Last year’s lecturer was the poet, novelist, cultural critic, and farmer Wendell Berry. Those Chronicles readers who are acquainted with him and his work will not be surprised that “It All Turns on Affection” is concerned with family farming.

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• Reviews

  January 2013

  What Was Not Lost

  The name of this book’s subject doesn’t appear in the text proper until page 14, and then as that of an adult attending the opening in London’s Bloomsbury of the Poetry Bookshop on January 8, 1913.

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• Reviews

  June 2012

  The Lady is Good

  Miss Buckley is telling stories, practicing the art of the raconteur—moreover, to mixed company, which is altogether fitting for her subjects.

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• Reviews

  May 2012

  To the End of the World

  Robert Hugh’s work hasn’t fared as well. His transgressiveness, as a postmodernist might call it, lay in proceeding from the Anglican priesthood into the Catholic Church.

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• Reviews

  April 2012

  The Fellowship of Joking

  “The key question to ask,” Christie Davies claims, “is why this particular set of jokes is in circulation at this particular time in this particular society rather than some other possible set.”

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• Reviews

  August 2011

  Anglo-Saxon Reality

  Some poems in Celtic languages are older, but the earliest sizable body of vernacular literature in Europe is the Old English, dating, by liberal estimation, from the seventh century to the twelfth.

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• Reviews

  July 2011

  Thunderbolt Kid

  Bill Bryson’s most salient quality is his humor, which ranges from sarcasm to wordplay but doesn’t seem to traffic much in zippy one-liners, else Richert might cite a few of them.

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• Vital Signs

  June 2011

  Kings Row Revisited

  I preferred Reagan when he was openly pursuing the actor’s trade, especially in Kings Row, which, from age 10 to 14, I tried to watch every time it was the Friday or Saturday late movie on one or another Twin Cities TV channel.

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• Reviews

  May 2011

  A Southern Foison

  In the Introduction to the first of these two volumes, Clyde Wilson allows, after a few paragraphs of justified complaint against the wholesale academic and political assault on Southern identity as well as Southern culture, that it was not always thus.

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• Reviews

  April 2011

  The One and Indispensable

  When Bill C. Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. first appeared in 1968, it was obviously the most careful, well-researched, judicious, and accessible book on any kind of American popular music, including jazz, that had been published up to that time.

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