Word: nighttown
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bruce Springsteen: Darkness on the Edge of Town (Columbia). Visions of challenge and redemption in nighttown America by a classic rock 'n' roller...
...woman's eyes turn "a green that was so fierce, Isaac had to grab the wall." In Ireland, the sky is so dark, "the elves must have put a roof on Cashel Hill." Shouts of murderers and comedians sound across the Hudson and Liffey rivers. Episodes in Nighttown and the underworld consciously echo the rhythms of James Joyce and Saul Bellow, but Charyn manages to sustain his own peculiar tone, a unique amalgam of psychological insight and scatological farce. It is one of the most unlikely and compeling literary combinations since T.S. Eliot's Gerontion mixed garlic...
...within the year was in Hollywood. Like the character he portrayed in Woody Allen's film The Front, Mostel was blacklisted during the McCarthy years. He made a triumphant return to the entertainment world, however, in the 1958 Broadway production of Ulysses in Nighttown, playing Leopold Bloom. In his varied roles onstage and in film-from the hapless movie entrepreneur in The Producers to the man turned beast in Ionesco's The Rhinoceros-Mostel was the master of paradoxes: a graceful fat man and a wise buffoon...
...specter of Leopold Bloom haunts this book... The easiest entry into its rhythms and movement is to recall the Bloomsday odyssey. I go out into the alien world, hard fearful, lonely. My afternoon stroll passes Sandymount strand: lustful, yearning, fleshy, I descend into a blasphemous bedeviled Nighttown.... and then I wander home...
...film cannot capture time as effectively as novels can--one cannot pause or immediately re-examine a scene, and only rarely can an event on film be extended beyond its actual duration--film's capabilities are better suited to capturing the flux of events. In Joyce's novel, the Nighttown section is written as if it were meant for the screen, stage directions included. It is the one part of the film that works, because you're not supposed to stop. The effect is no tied up in language but in movement and image...