THE MADE MAN

Jonathan Rosenbaum

This review of was commissioned by its writer-director-producer-editor, Drew Hanks. The Made Man’s trailer can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/rPH9HbveDRk – J.R.

One striking trait shared by the United States and the Catholic Church is a taste for symbolism that overtakes material reality. The same mentality that converts wine into blood can also turn racial differences into graphic abstractions that replace facts so that pinkish brown individuals are called “white” and slightly darker brown individuals can be called “black”.

One of the more eloquent descriptions of this taste for metaphysics over material reality comes from Mary McCarthy, a lapsed Catholic and an American, who argues in her 1947 essay “America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub” that “the virtue of American civilization is that it is unmaterialistic”:

“It is true that America produces and consumes more cars, soap, and bathtubs than any other nation, but we live among these objects rather than by them….When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans….The strongest argument for the unmaterialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.” Read more

The Tower Of The Seven Hunchbacks (with an emailed postscript)

From the Chicago Reader (October 26, 1987). — J.R.

Edgar Neville — an aristocratic Republican filmmaker and writer who was friends with everyone from Lorca and Chaplin to Ortega y Gasset and Lacan — is one of the great undiscovered auteurs of the Spanish cinema. This remarkable turn-of-the-century fantasy, which suggests an eerie encounter between the tales of Borges and the early melodramas of Feuillade and Lang, starts off as a supernatural mystery as the hero (Antonio Casal) is persuaded by a one-eyed ghost to solve the case of his murder. This leads him first to the ghost’s niece (Isabel de Pomes) and eventually to a hidden underground city beneath the old section of Madrid that contains an ancient synagogue and is presided over by hunchbacked counterfeiters. Based on a novel by Emilio Carrere, this hallucinatory fiction ends rather abruptly and never manages to account for all the mysteries it uncovers, but as pure, primal storytelling it is as creepy a spellbinder as one could wish for (1944). (JR)

On November 27, 2017 I received the following email, sent from Spain: