STAGECOACH

This is the movie that made Westerns A-fare and broke John Wayne out of the B-picture ranks. It also contains just about the best ensemble cast ever formed, not only for a Western, but for any movie.

Thomas Mitchell crowned a fantastic year which saw roles in “Gone With The Wind”, “Only Angels Have Wings”, “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” and “The Hunchback Of Notre Dame”. Any one of those, especially in the first two mentioned films, could have taken the Oscar, but Doc Boone got it. In many ways he exemplifies the message of the entire film which is the lifting up of the fallen.

Doc Boone, run out of town for drunkenness, delivered a baby on the trail and became an inspiration for others. He stood up to the villains in Lordsburg no one else was willing to stand up to.

John Carradine portrayed the fallen southern gentleman who came back for one last moment of gallantry.

Dallas (played by Clair Trevor) moves our heartstrings through her desire to rise above the life she has fallen in to, but which she feels unable to get above. Somehow her simplicity shines brighter than the virtue of the self-righteous. She reminds us that before God all of our righteousness is as filthy rags, but also that God is able to use anyone.

The Ringo Kid (Wayne) is out for revenge and gets it, but somehow it moves from being the central issue in his life to a side one. In a sense his fight is a just one which society will not fight for him. Many of us feel that way at times when we know we have the right on our side, but no authority will back us up. He gets a final reprieve when he is sent on his way with Dallas to a new life of redemption elsewhere.

We also see the mighty fall to their own sins as in the case of the absconding banker or become humbled as the proud army wife is in having to accept help from the woman of fallen virtue.

Then there is Donald Meek, a favorite of mine. He is an actor who almost always lived up to his name. There is something totally endearing about the little whisky drummer who can’t resist the advances of the drunken doctor on his samples, but who is willing to brave dangers for the sake of the ladies and the new baby.

God has similarly put us in a world with many kinds of characters in it. What matters at the end is our own character. Will it be that of Jesus or will it be our own?

(Sorry it's taken me so long to finish this series of my top 10 favorite films, this being #4. The blog has kind of gone on the back burner, but I'll finish it soon and get on to other things)

CASABLANCA

And now for the most iconic film on my list. It took me some time to come up with these thoughts. Casablanca has become almost everyone’s favorite film. Still, I’m going to make some comments on it, as it’s my fifth favorite film.

When it was made, Casablanca was just another one of the films put out that year, but now everyone knows the snappy lines: “Everybody comes to Rick’s”, “Play it, Sam” (there was no again about it ever) and “Round up the usual suspects”. They’ve become a part of popular culture, but my interest came when Casablanca was still being shown as an afternoon matinee movie on television back in the 60s along with a lot of forgettable stuff on the same line-up. I don’t think I had ever heard about it; I just happened to see it in the guide and watched it with no expectations.

I was initially attracted to the character of Rick rather than the romance element. That’s how I saw myself in those days, the misunderstood loner who always lost out, but who kept on true to his code despite obstacles. In a way this is not a “love” story, but a story of right triumphing over “romance”.

There is a right above and beyond our emotions. That is a powerful message. It’s one that might not even have been put in the film were it made for the first time today. I wonder just who would have gotten on the Lisbon plane at the end? To do it any other way than what they did do it would have been to cheapen it into nothing.

Circumstances don’t change cases. The young Bulgarian girl who wanted to become a situational ethicist doing something bad so that it could ensure something good for someone she loved was shown to be wrong. All of her finer feeling of being so much older than her young husband would never have made her act good.

Sometimes, though, we innocently do wrong as Ilsa did in Paris with Rick when she thought her husband was dead. She wasn’t to blame for that, but she could not in the present time take it as an excuse for abdicating the right. Our past cannot force us to any wrong. Nothing gives such a license. In the end Rick decided for everyone and decided right. There were consequences to that choice, but he walked off the screen in peace and with a new mission in life.

REGRET

God calls people to repent, but He never called anyone to regret.

CROSS CARRYING

Recently for a message I wanted to demonstrate what it meant to carry the cross. We have one just a little taller than me that we’ve used in programs. It’s not as large as what Jesus would have been on, but I wanted to find out what it meant to carry it, so I brought it up from the church basement one day and carried it around the auditorium for a practice session. In that session I found out several things.

Once you get a hold of the cross you can no longer control what happens.

It’s unwieldy; you bang into things (which is why I didn’t carry it around the room when I actually preached the message).

It’s hard to get a grip on.

You can’t just carry it as a “regular” thing in your pockets or on your person. It’s infinitely more weighty than a small necklace.

It requires concentration to carry.

You can’t be doing a lot of other things when you’re carrying it; it requires all your attention.

The one thing you know, though, when you carry the cross, is exactly what you are doing. There’s no haziness about bearing a cross. It gives purpose, control, direction unlike any other element in your life.

We should carry our crosses in this manner, not as a sacrifice, but as those who are following in the steps of Jesus, experiencing what He experienced and ministering as He ministers.

1700

I have reached a milestone. I wrote song #1700. The words for song #1 were written in the spring of 1972, but the melody was not finalized until the next fall. (Took a long time to get one down in those days.)

Many times when I’ve been doing these sort of milestone efforts I’ve hoped for something that would be well above the average. This time it was.

I’ve been preaching on the heart, so it’s not surprising that the song would be about the presence of the Holy Spirit inside us. Everything went just sort of average until I got to the last line. Then I wrote down something that even surprised me, and I was the one who wrote it. At first I thought, “That can’t be right”, then I remembered scriptures like Galatians 2:20 and Romans 8:10 which say exactly what the song says. It’s called “His Address”.

It is His Spirit that lives in me
The foretaste of all things
The Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ
Now inside my heart resides
This means that God is not
So far away as it seems
It means that Jesus knows where to find me
For His address is me
© 2010 Kevin Don Levellie

Layering in the novel The Go-Between

Recently Jeanette picked up the book I was reading, The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. She read the backliner note about this novel being “richly layered” and asked me what that meant. At the time I didn’t come up with a ready answer, but after some thought from the next day on until I finished the book I have come up with the following notes. I had seen the film based on the book and then read the book back in the early 1970s when I was in college, but with a larger frame of reference from the passing decades I now see more of what Hartley was really saying, probably because I’m close point of view in the book which is that of a man in his early sixties.

The book is ostensibly the recounting of a painful incident in the story of a boy growing up which is the basis of his being shut off from the experience of life on an emotional level.

Overlaid on or interwoven into that story frame are the following elements:

A young woman trying to break away from social constraints.

Family structure and organization tested.

An exploration of what true gentlemanliness is.

The effects of sin.

Nostalgia for a past that didn’t fully realize its promise.

Understanding the realm of the senses.

Searching the occult realm and finding it uncontrollable and disastrous.

Learning the rules of society.

Being defined by the words of others.

False responsibility bearing and responsibility abdication.

Maturation and growing a conscience.

The communication process.

Also, there is some overall social criticism against the old caste system and the lack of social mobility in the late Victorian era.

These are not just topics dealt with in these book or themes explored, but definite layers which could be followed out on their own through the length of the book. Others may define “layering” in a different way, but this is how I happened to see it in the book which I just finished reading this morning.

The Go-Between is a painful book. We read it like we do the horrendous Greek tragedies of old because it strikes a chord by telling us unpleasant truths in an insightful way. Pain, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, is a message that something is wrong. In the end of the book the woman who manipulated the storyteller’s childhood world so horrifically is still denying her complicity in the consequences of what she did and redefining the past to keep from taking the blame. Thus, she’s trapped in the past, but Hartley’s now grown character can change, if he will.

When others won’t accept responsibility for the past, it’s up to you to make sense of it. The Christian has the extra resource Jesus. Those who will not learn from pain will never get to all the joys they could.

35 years

Today marks 35 years since Jeanette and I were married.

When I was much younger I always used to have this idea that you should have or would find a sweetheart on Valentines Day. Twenty-three of them went by with no Valentine. But, no more.

I am so thankful for Jeanette.

She is the one who brought me out of my shyer self of younger years. (I was too embarrassed to ask a waitress for a glass of water.)

She has been a constant source of encouragement and prayer.

She has been my best friend for all of these years.

She has lifted me up more times than I can remember.

I love her.