Summary: Directed by the prolific Julien Duvivier, Pépé le Moko is based on a pulp crime novel written by Détective Ashelbé, a pseudonym for Henri La Barthe. It tells the story of a charismatic and glamorous master thief Pépé le Moko, played by Jean Gabin in one of his iconic roles, who has fled from…
Tag: Analysis
Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road): Story Summary & Analysis
Story Summary: In the lush Bengali countryside the struggles of everyday life for the Ray family unfold through the stories of its members. The long-suffering mother, Sarbojya, is subjected to the ignominies of life so common to the poor, while her daughter Durga, a clever, often naughty girl who is tragically bereft of horizons, languishes…
The Passion of Joan of Arc: Summary & Analysis
Summary: A chronicle of the trial of Jeanne d’Arc on charges of heresy, and the efforts of her ecclesiastical jurists to force Jeanne to recant her claims of holy visions. Analysis: The poet and proto-feminist ‘H.D.’ (Hilda Doolittle) wrote about her experience of watching this film in 1928. She describes feeling nervous to the point…
A Worn Path: Analysis
Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” written in 1940, is one of the author’s most frequently anthologized stories, but this by no means indicates that it is her easiest. There is a depth of ambiguity in it. Twentieth-century critics have chosen, for the most part, to examine the role race plays in the story and through…
The Train From Rhodesia: Analysis
Nadine Gordimer has been called South Africa’s “First Lady of Letters,” and she is perhaps that country’s most distinguished living fiction writer. The author of many volumes of collected short stories and novels, in addition to numerous lectures, essays, and other works of nonfiction, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. This…
The Swimmer by John Cheever: Analysis
On a literal level, “The Swimmer” is the story of one man’s initially fanciful, ultimately quite serious adventure swimming through every pool in the county on his way home. On a deeper level, though, the story alludes to some of Western literature’s most enduring themes. Neddy Merrill, Cheever’s hero, is Odysseus, Dante, the Fisher King,…
The Story Of An Hour: Analysis
In Donald F. Larsson’s entry on Kate Chopin in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, we learn that “consistently … strong-willed, independent heroines … [who] cast a skeptical eye on the institution of marriage” are very characteristic of her stories. In “The Story of an Hour,” we do not so much see as intuit Mrs. Mallard’s…
Fight Club: Story Summary, Analysis
Regarding Fight Club there are two camps: those who consider it a disturbing celebration of homoerotic brutality, and those who have actually seen it. Ostensibly, it’s a movie about the creation of a ‘fight club’, where guys beat the crap out of one another bare knuckled so they can feel real again. Fight Club is…
El Topo (Movie): Meaning, Analysis
There is a cliché I want to see retired, no made illegal – the cliché of comparing something edgy to something bland by claiming ‘Such-and-such is like (insert bland item here) on acid’. The only exception would have to be El Topo, which really is a ‘Western on acid’. More specifically, this is a spaghetti…
Easy Rider (Movie): Meaning, Analysis
Just how cool is Easy Rider? Apparently we’ve now reached ‘post’ post-modern. There is a commercial running in America where a dull office drone is inserted via computer-generated animation into footage of Peter Fonda on his chopper from Easy Rider. Turns out the 9 to 5’er is just having a daydream aboard a commuter train…