A Gilded Planet

Went the Day Well? 1942.  92 minutes. United Kingdom. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. Watchdate: 10/06/2011. A surreal Graham Greene scripted propaganda about Nazi paratroopers impersonating English soldiers in a small town. It's  Red Dawn 1942 : Buñuel meets Hitchcock. And so we get a matron diving on grenade. We get a woman gracefully walking downstairs wielding a giant revolver. We get the best murder scene outside of Torn Curtain . In fact, perhaps it inspired Torn Curtain ? This movie may have inspired every dream that we call a movie.

Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal My rating: 4 of 5 stars Bohumil Hrabel weaves a WWII-set bildungsroman that deftly moves between youthful melancholy and outlandish farce sometimes in the same moment. It's a dreamy, introverted book in many ways, just like its protagonist, yet it never shies away from addressing the politics and humanism that were constantly at stake in occupied Europe. While it never addresses the Holocaust directly, it's treatment of that incomprehensible level of brutality is unmistakable and very powerful in the book's more allegorical passages. Apparently, there's an excellent movie based on this book that I'll have to see someday.