Chameleons

"What _Call It Sleep_ has in common with these lasting works is a determined sense of art sustaining itself in a fallen world, a time of endless troubles, of political and social fright."-- Alfred Kazin

What Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman share in common is the secular submersion of their identity for commercialization, and this despite the fact that Kirk, surviving his new age counterpart, was better at playing the traumatized Zionist who finally gives in to psychiatric methodology. There is something off in Newman's performance in Exodus, something that is not missing in Hud or The Hustler, those devastating new wave heavies-- and what might be allegorical in Cool Hand Luke, not that I'd be able to ascertain if the southern penal system in the 60's would kill a white man, whose assimilated ethnicity was invisible, over vandalism which signified a personal insurgency. I am wondering if this is why Jewish liberalism is almost invariably an unwritten codicil to American Constitutional protections, not that Nazism won't remain as a faux specter, at least until my sister's great grandchildren begin to procreate.

Hud actually reminds me of one of Balzac's grandiose misers, which might be giving Newman too much credit for his uncompromising western brutalist.