Each week, Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx contributes a commentary and selects some of the magazine’s most provocative, vivid, or timely pieces to highlight. Content is added daily — go here to see what is new.
From The Editor’s Desk
The Harvard Film Archive was closed over the summer months because of restoration activities at the Carpenter Center, but the facility has just opened, and it is starting off with a fine series — running through October 19 — entitled “The Cold Heart is More Precious Than Diamonds: The Cinema of Graham Greene.” The focus is on films based on the writer’s fiction, but his intersection with the movie world also took the form of criticism — from 1935 to 1940, he was the film critic for The Spectator and, for a short period, Night and Day, eventually publishing over 400 reviews. Greene was a fierce reviewer — incisive, unruly, and witty. For those not familiar with this aspect of his celluloid-adjacent career, it is well worth reading through the pieces collected in The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories.
Some of Greene’s judgments hold up, such as his admiration of the films of John Ford. Others do not, particularly his puzzling disparagement of Alfred Hitchcock. For me, there is no question that Greene is wrong when he claims the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races is better than their A Night at the Opera. A strain of sexism runs throughout the reviews: Jean Harlow “totes her breasts like a man totes a gun.” But, as one contemporary admirer put it, Greene “can feel his subject more intimately than anyone else writing in England today. His criticism is that of a creative writer.”
That passion inevitably led Greene into the use of satire. The reviewer was tasked with ridiculing mediocrity—both its makers and those who enabled it to flourish. Greene put it this way: “This is to make a flank attack upon the reader, to persuade him to laugh at personalities, stories, ideas and methods that he has previously only taken for granted. We need to be rude, rude even to our fellow reviewers, but not in the plain downright way, which may help to kill a picture, but leaves its kind untouched. The cinema needs to be purged with laughter.”
Greene’s merciless mockery of the big studios’ sentimentality and sexual hypocrisy was prescient. In 1937, Hollywood moguls brought a libel suit against him and Night and Day, alleging that Greene’s review of Wee Willie Winkie implied that nine-year-old Shirley Temple was being sexually exploited. Greene had pointed to Temple’s “dubious coquetry” and suggested a “more secret and more adult” dimension to her appeal. The resulting settlement helped bring about the magazine’s demise. In an era before social media, it was a daring—and devastatingly mischievous—critique.
— Bill Marx, Editor
Latest Views & Reviews from the Fuse
Music
The Cramps’ Lost Album, Unearthed
By Steve Erickson
A newly released 1977 collection documents the Cramps making the past feel dangerous again. Read the review
Books
“The Black Shield” — A Black Family’s Reckoning with Policing and Power
By Bill Littlefield
In his powerful memoir, Wilbert L. Cooper examines the paradox of Black police officers seeking safety and status inside an institution shaped by racial violence. Read the review
Dance
Dancing the Odissi in my Spine — Bijayini Satpathy’s New Journey
By Smitha Radhakrishnan
In her Boston solo premiere, Rāgachitra, the former Nrityagram artist draws on a lifetime in classical Indian dance to create searching, contemporary works shaped by memory, mythology, gender, and an inward turn. Read the preview
Music
Anne-Sophie Mutter’s Restless New-Music Advocacy
By Jonathan Blumhofer
The violinist’s latest Alpha recording pairs two late works by André Previn with Sebastian Currier’s witty, searching Ringtone Variations. Read the review
Film
“Don’t Say Good Luck” Finds Grace in Grief, Theater, and Teenage Life
By Sarah Osman
Sunny Sandler gives a quietly affecting performance in a heartfelt, unsentimental coming-of-age drama about a high school musical, a mother’s cancer recurrence, and the precarious coexistence of sorrow and joy. Read the review
Film
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” — Slasher Summers, Reimagined
By Peg Aloi
Director Jane Schoenbrun’s seductive, funny, and unsettling meditation on horror, desire, and cinema turns summer-camp carnage into a tale of identity, intimacy, and renewal. Read the review
Theater
John Turturro Resists the Herd in A.R.T.’s “Rhinoceros”
By Bill Marx
Director Diane Paulus’s high-spirited A.R.T. adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s anti-conformist play sometimes overplays its comic business, but John Turturro’s scruffy, strident, and anguished Berenger gives the production its necessary mix of horror, humor, and desperate resistance. Read the review
Books
“The Frenchmen” — When Literary Theory Was Cool, French, and Sexy
By Henry Carrigan
In a lively blend of memoir, intellectual history, and philosophical primer, Emily Eakin revisits the French theorists who transformed American literary studies—and asks what their skepticism about language and power can still offer in the age of AI. Read the review
Film Retrospective: “Taxi Driver” at 50
Martin Scorsese’s feverish New York classic remains a master class in urban atmosphere and subjective filmmaking—and a chilling study of how alienation curdles into violent fantasy. Read the feature
