Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is John Huston's beautifully shot Moulin Rouge (1952).
Moulin Rouge is the story of 19th century French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, portrayed by José Ferrer. The film records his frustration over his physical handicap (the growth in his legs was stunted by a childhood accident), his efforts to "lose" himself in Paris' bawdy Montmartre district, and his career as a painter, which brought him money only when he turned out advertising posters--but what posters!
New York Times 1952 film review:
If the measure of the quality of a motion picture merely boils down to how much the screen is crowded with stunning illustration, then John Huston's "Moulin Rouge" well qualifies for consideration as one of the most felicitous movies ever made. For this fictionalized dramatization of the checkered life of Toulouse-Lautrec, the fin-de-sicle French painter, whom José Ferrer primly portrays, is a bounty of gorgeous color pictures of the Parisian café world at the century's turn and of beautifully patterned compositions conveying sentiments, moods and atmosphere.
With the help of an army of artists, which included Ossie Morris, his camera man; his art director, costume designer and a "special color consultant," Eliot Elisofon, Mr. Huston has brilliantly accomplished what emerges unquestionably to be the most vivacious and exciting illustration of bohemian Paris ever splashed upon the screen. From the fairly intoxicating opening, with dancers swirling in the smoky haze and the overcrowded climate of the wine-colored Moulin Rouge, to the last poignant sequence wherein Lautrec sees these same dancers ghosting through the rooms of his family's chateau near Albi as he lies on his painful deathbed, the exquisiteness of the illustration is superlative and complete.
A color-dazed mind fairly totters with the riot of images that remain, floating and whirling through the memory, after an initial viewing of this film. They emerge with distinct definition—the can-can dancers in a foam of pantaloons, black-stockinged legs pointing skywards and skirts in pastel shades; a street of the Latin Quarter at night with the golden round of a gas-light faintly dusting Lautrec's dark and cruelly dwarfed form; a flower-vendor's cart on a Paris morning; acrobats under the dome of the circus roof; fox-hunters riding across French meadows; dawn on a bridge over the Seine.
Mr. Huston has got a motion picture in which the eyes are played upon with colors and forms and compositions in a pattern as calculated as a musical score. And the sheer stimulation is not only charming but it develops a flow of emotional response within the bewitched beholder that is keyed, indeed, to the plot. For instance, the color transition from rich and ruddy tones and from vivid and sparkling details in the scenes in the Moulin Rouge to the soft and subdued lights and shadows of Lautrec's studio is more evocative of feeling than the acting that is done. And the demoniac suggestion in the green tone that hovers around a scene in which Lautrec prepares to commit suicide is more depressing than is Mr. Ferrer.
As a matter of fact, the performance which this talented actor gives in a story that is highly sentimental is pretty much the creation of a mere facade. His Lautrec is a gross and grotesque figure, with his black beard, his priggish pince-nez, his thick lips, his burly body and his pitifully truncated legs. (Mr. Ferrer has used an ingenious harness to simulate the painter's deformity). And his acting, which is done very largely with his bodily poses and his eyes, does little more, in their limited employment, than ditto the absurdity and pathos of this facade.
The fault is not his entirely. Mr. Huston's and Anthony Veiller's script is a not very fluent or plausible re-work of the old "Of Human Bondage" theme. The self-depreciating artist falls in love with a gutter girl whose harsh but inevitable treatment of him makes it impossible for him to accept unselfish love. The lushly romantic fabrication is not only a simplification of the facts of Lautrec's life but it is in the realm of personal torment that is all to familiar on the screen.
However, it must be said that Colette Marchand does a quick but excruciating job of revealing the sharp, metallic spirit and the helpless weakensses of the gutter girl. Less can be said for the handsome but surface performance of Suzanne Flon as the elegant, idealized woman who respectfully loves the little man. Katherine Kath and Muriel Smith as cafe dancers, Harold Gasket as the proprietor of the Moulin Rouge and Zsa Zsa Gabor as the famous chanteuse, Avril, are vastly colorful, however, in their roles.
And color, of course, is the big thing in this film on the Capitol's screen—color that flows in a creation that quite o'ershadows the famous painter's poster art.
MOULIN ROUGE, screen play by Anthony Veiller and John Huston, based on the novel by Pierre LaMure; directed by John Huston. A Romulus Films Production released here by United Artists. At the Capitol.
Toulouse-Lautrec and
The Comte de Toulouse-Lautrec . . . . . Jose Ferrer
Marie Charlet . . . . . Colette Marchand
Myriamme . . . . . Suzanne Flon
Jane Avril . . . . . Zsa Zsa Gabor
La Goulue . . . . . Katherine Kath
Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec . . . . . Claude Nollier
Aicha . . . . . Muriel Smith
Patou . . . . . Georges Lannes
Valentin Dessosse . . . . . Walter Crisham
Madame Loubet . . . . . Mary Clare
Maurice Joyant . . . . . Lee Montague
Zidler . . . . . Harold Gasket
Sarah . . . . . Jill Bennet
Denise . . . . . Maureen Swanson
Pere Cotelle . . . . . Jim Gerald
Chocolat . . . . . Rupert John
This, of course, is the height of irony -- women calling for a return to slavery. Of course, as the West relinquishes the moral imperative, the forces of oppression and subjugation will fill the void.
This mirrors the abandonment of decades of progress in Turkey. Ataturk will be nothing more than an historical blip.
I await the hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of Muslim women calling for the end of the sharia.
TUNIS — Hundreds of Muslim women gathered near Tunis Saturday to call for the return of the caliphate, the defunct Islamic system of governance which they said was the only means of guaranteeing their rights.
The members of the Hizb ut-Tahrir party came from Islamic countries including Arab states, Indonesia and Turkey, as well as from Europe to debate the benefits of the system that disappeared nearly 90 years ago.
"This conference raises questions about the secular liberal way of life and asks whether it is a system that has succeed in securing the dignity and rights of women," chief spokeswoman Nasrin Nawaaz of the British branch of the party told AFP.
"Muslim women are gathering together saying that we no longer want to live under secular liberal democratic systems," she added.
"We want a new system, we want the khalifa system that historically has been tried and has succeeded in securing the rights of women."
Nawaz said that countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran that promote themselves as Islamic states "in reality they implement nothing but the rules of dictatorship."
Men were banned from the conference, which opened with a film castigating Western political systems and calling for "patient and determined work to re-establish the law of Islam."
Founded in 1953, Hizb ut-Tahir has members and sympathisers in more than 50 countries. It seeks the return of the caliphate, based on Islamic charia law, by political means.
The caliphate was introduced after the death of Mohammed to govern the Muslim world and held by a succession of dynasties based in different cities before the emergence of nation states.
The fifth and last caliphate held sway under the Turkish Ottomans and was abolished in 1924 by the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
HuffPo's Pro-Jihad Propaganda
Pamela Geller
John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, has written a curious apologia for the irrational murders and riots taking place in Afghanistan in response to the inadvertent burning of Qurans at Bagram Airfield. More
John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, has written a curious apologia for the irrational murders and riots taking place in Afghanistan in response to the inadvertent burning of Qurans at Bagram Airfield. In "America's Image Problem in Afghanistan" in the Huffington Post, Feffer says that "the United States definitely sends mixed messages to the Muslim world."
The messages don't seem mixed. Obama's abandonment of our allies, his alienation of Israel, and his deference and submission to the Muslim world: bowing to the Saudi king; groveling to the Muslim world at Al-Azhar University in June 2009; ordering NASA to extol the contributions of the Muslim world; giving vocal support to the reviled Ground Zero mosque at his Iftar gala; the administration's endless apologies for the Quran-burnings; his $800 million in aid to the Muslim Brotherhood for their Islamic Spring; his silence on the Egyptian hostage crisis; his billet doux to Iran's Khamenei; his gift of our drone to Iran; his scrubbing of any mention of jihad, even when jihadists discuss it themselves, from law enforcement counter-terrorism materials; his partnering with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on the suppression of free speech (i.e., the enforcement of Islamic blasphemy laws in the West) -- all this doesn't send any mixed message at all.
Feffer is, of course, referring to the burning of Qurans. He says: "You'd think the U.S. army would be a little more careful. Last April, when members of the Dove World Outreach Center burned a Quran after putting it on trial, riots broke out in Afghanistan and left scores of people dead, including seven UN staff."
Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center didn't kill those people; Muslims did. Our soldiers didn't desecrate those Qurans at Bagram Airfield; Muslims did when they wrote messages of killing and jihad inside them and used them for jihad plotting. What's more, why should we be bound by sharia rules regarding treatment of the Quran? That is not our holy book. It will never be our holy book.
Yet Feffer nevertheless says that "the United States obviously has a serious image problem." The United States' image problem is freedom. It is a problem for those who wish to impose the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth on the rest of us. Feffer notes that "the Pentagon takes great pains to avoid charges of Islamophobia," but where is the cultural training for the Muslim world? Where is the sensitivity training for the Muslim world? When do they learn to play well with others? Jihad is cutting its bloody swath across free and not-so-free countries, and hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims and non-practicing Muslims are paying the horrible price. Ferrer can't ascribe all that to "Islamophobia."
Feffer complains: "It doesn't help that so many U.S. politicians talk about Islam as though it were the greatest enemy of humanity. ... Indeed, rarely does a day go by in the Republican primaries that one of the candidates doesn't defame Islam. Santorum and Gingrich have both laid it on thick with their wild accusations about the threat of sharia law and their misrepresentations of the Park51 Islamic cultural center."
We don't apologize for our greatness. We don't apologize for who we are. We are the greatest nation on earth. John Feffer, on the other hand, wants us to surrender; Feffer likes what he sees on the other side of the abyss. Feffer ought to back up his admiration and reluctance to criticize the human rights abuses inherent in Islamic law and go live under the sharia. Maybe then he wouldn't be such a self-important clown.
But in the meantime, he whines that "fire-starters like Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer continue to badmouth not Islam or 'bad Muslims' or 'Islamic radicalism,' but mainstream Islam itself. Park51, which expanded the Geller-Spencer soapbox to monstrous proportions, was hardly the threat they made it out to be. If they'd only bothered to read the writings of the cultural center's founder, they might have discovered a philosophical co-religionist."
The problem for Feffer is that we actually did read Rauf's writings. In his book, he advocated for the sharia -- the most radical, oppressive and extreme ideology on the planet. But then he told lemmings like Feffer something else entirely. Yet in reality, Rauf was a prominent member of the Perdana Organization that funded the jihad warship flotilla designed to provoke the tiny Jewish state into war. On board, the "peace activists" were chanting a genocidal jihad chant referring back to Muhammad's massacre of the last Jews of Arabia. And Rauf refused to condemn Hamas for months until pressed.
You have to read the whole thing here.
When will reporting acts of jihad become illegal? That's blasphemy, too. Perhaps that's why the mainstream media self-enforces the sharia and redacts Islam, "allahu akbar," etc. from the thousands of jihadi attacks across the world, or the sharia from news stories about honor killing, FGM, gender apartheid, etc.
Clearly, the UK is fast becoming the first Islamic state in Europe.
Is England Saudi Arabia now? Is Sharia in effect? Is it now illegal to post material "offensive to the Islamic faith" in a window? If Conway had posted material "offensive to the Christian faith," would he have been arrested or jailed? Who decides what is offensive?
I haven't seen what Conway posted, and I do not support the BNP or any group with race-based policies or any truck with antisemitism, but this is a free speech issue. His political views are as irrelevant as his marijuana possession: he got the year in jail for the material on Islam, and another three months for the cannabis.
Unless what he posted in his window was calling for violence or genocide, it shouldn't matter how offensive it may have been to any group or individual. Clearly there is no more freedom of speech regarding Islam in Britain; under the guise of "hate speech" laws, Sharia blasphemy laws have become the law of the land. The arbiters of what constitutes "offensive" material control the discourse, and no dissent is allowed. This is the road to tyranny.
"Gainsborough man jailed over anti-Islam images in his flat window," from This Is Lincolnshire, March 9 (thanks to Ima):
A GAINSBOROUGH man who plastered his front window with vile anti-Islamic hate literature has been jailed for a year.
Darren Conway, a self-confessed supporter of right-wing organisations, was given a 12-months' sentence at Lincoln Crown Court.
The court was told on Tuesday that carer Conway had covered the front window of his ground floor flat in Heaton Street in Gainsborough with 17 photographs and posters.
Many were offensive – attacking both the prophet Mohammed and the Muslim religion.
Conway, 44, had denied displaying the religiously aggravated hate material on April 16 last year.
But he was convicted following a short trial earlier this year, when sentencing was postponed for reports to be prepared.
Judge Michael Heath told Conway: "To describe the material you put in your window as grossly offensive is an understatement.
"There is no place in a civilised society for conduct of that sort and the only sentence I can justify for it is an immediate custodial sentence."
Conway was also given a three-month concurrent jail sentence – to run alongside the longer term – after admitting unlawful production of cannabis.
Sixteen cannabis plants were found growing in his home when police visited to investigate the hate crime.
Christopher Lowe, prosecuting, said that Conway, who admitted to supporting both the BNP and the English Defence League, was caught after a member of the public complained to police.
"Later that day police attended the premises and found 17 posters and images in the front window in full public view," said Mr Lowe.
"The majority of the displayed posters and images were undoubtedly offensive to the Islamic faith.
"Conway was arrested at the scene and taken into police custody.
"He appeared to make out that those posters were, more or less, an opportunity to get back at his landlord.
"He was trying to justify them on a political and religious basis.
"In the back room was found a small grow of cannabis plants. Sixteen plants were growing under heated lamps."...
UPDATE: Over 90 rockets hit Israel since Friday
Iron Dome intercepts 25 out of 27 rockets fired at Beersheba, Ashdod, Ashkelon; IAF kills 14 Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza strikes. Gantz: IDF to respond with determination to any attack
UPDATE: Here are how the enemies of freedom report the Gaza air strikes (hat tip Paulo)
BBC:
---"The Israeli military said" dozens of rockets had been fired into Israel (!???!)
---The first air strike came a few hours after two mortar shells fired from Gaza "landed" in Israel
"without causing injury". (better are "exploded")
CNN :
---A series of Israeli airstrikes targeted "suspected militants" across Gaza overnight
---"Israel said"
etc ,etc.
Just like Nazi Germany. The world sanctions this evil. Tens of thousands of rockets have been fired into Israel over the past seven years, after Israel gave away Gaza. For what? These ongoing rockets attacks were ratcheted up last night. Expect the world to howl and scream bloody murder when the Jews defend themselves.
Israel under Fire (hat tip Jack)
- Over the past 24 hours, over 45 rockets have hit communities in southern Israel – injuring four people, one severely, one moderately and two lightly.
- The Iron Dome active missile defense system has intercepted over 10 Grad rockets – which were fired at the cities of Be’er Sheva, Ashdod and Ashkelon, together home to over 520,000 people.
 - Archive: Densely populated areas are the targets of the rockets
- Overnight, IAF aircraft targeted two weapon manufacturing facilities and two rocket launching sites in the northern Gaza Strip, a weapon manufacturing facility in the central Gaza Strip and a terror activity site in the southern Gaza Strip.
- In addition, IAF aircraft targeted a terrorist in the central Gaza Strip and six additional terrorist squads who were in the final stages of preparing to fire rockets at Israel from separate locations in the northern and the central Gaza Strip. Direct hits were identified.
The targeting is in direct response to the rocket fire at Israeli communities in southern Israel.
Israel Under Fire: Damage caused by rockets fired from Gaza (credit: megapixel.com)
The IDF is prepared to defend the residents of Israel and will respond with strength and determination against any attempt to execute terrorist attacks. Hamas uses other terror organizations to carry out terror attacks against the State of Israel and will bear the consequences of these actions in any future operation embarked upon by the IDF in order to eliminate the terror threat and restore the relative calm to the area.
Archive: Firemen extinguishing fire caused by a Grad rocket.
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