Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Religious Zionist. Republican. Movie fanatic. Gun owner. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Bonnie & Clyde

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“For all actors know that truly natural acting is rejected by the audience. Although people are better equipped to judge acting than any other art, the hypocrisy of ‘sincerity’ prevents them from admitting that they too are always acting some part of their own invention. To be a successful actor, then, it is necessary to add some eccentricities and mystery to naturalness so that the audience can admire and puzzle over something different from itself.” -Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (photo via Kobal Collection, c. 1929)American actress Louise Bro. Photo by Eugene Robert Richee, 1928.
“For all actors know that truly natural acting is rejected by the audience. Although people are better equipped to judge acting than any other art, the hypocrisy of ‘sincerity’ prevents them from admitting that they too are always acting some part of their own invention. To be a successful actor, then, it is necessary to add some eccentricities and mystery to naturalness so that the audience can admire and puzzle over something different from itself.”
—Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood, Photo by Eugene Robert Richee, 1928.

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Friday Flickers: Three Notable Films About Terrorism

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Evil in soft focus. Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) examines Clyde's (Warren Beatty), um, gun, in “Bonnie and Clyde.”

Faye Dunaway once told me that to play a role she had to commit to the character with all her heart and soul. She needed, she explained, to love the character.

In terms of performance this means the actor has to empathize and identify with the fictional character. The danger lies in a character who is evil. If a skillful actor identifies and loves a character, as Faye, a brilliant actress, did with the homicidal Bonnie Parker in Bonnie & Clyde (1967), or the amoral Diana Christensen in Network (1976), then the audience will also love the character.

Because movies are a moral landscape, sympathetic villains can be something of an ethical problem.

We allow for a certain amount of romanticism in the movies. Afterall, that’s why we go to the movies. But what happens when the subject of the film is contemporary terrorism—evil which should be beyond gauzy romanticism?

Seraphic Secret surveys three powerful and effective movies whose subject is terrorism and true-life terrorists.

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