![]() ![]() The other half acquired the bug from the less slapdash but also less flavorful summaries of directorial careers in Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema, creating a chasm that persists to this day. Half the virgin cinephiles in my now graying demographic got their introduction to small-g grails from the capsule descriptions of a slew of old movies in Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, mostly culled from her program notes when she was running Bay Area revival houses in the 1950s. But screw it: Nobody else had The Devil’s General, a reassuringly anti-Nazi (whew) 1955 German drama about a rogue Luftwaffe general who goes sour on Hitler’s war machine that I’d wanted to see since I was 15 or so. Out of what I’m guessing is cheerful capitalist cretinism, not ideology-though you never know-they also sell a very dumb line of mock souvenirs on the level of T-shirts commemorating the 10th SS Panzer Division’s "World Tour," har har. B & B caters to World War II reenactors and suchlike fetishists by peddling a wargasbord of obscure DVD titles that makes no distinctions between deserving and cheesy, not to mention maggoty. Once their catalog showed up with its dingy mail-order tongue hanging out, I felt a little dismayed for encouraging them. Hence my one and, I’m pretty sure, only transaction with Belle & Blade War Video. But since neither of those is likely to happen, we settle for small-g grails instead. We can’t help but fantasize about stumbling across the long-lost complete version of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed in a Pasadena attic, say, or whooping it up at the blooper reel from The Passion of the Christ-which probably does exist somewhere, guarded by Opus Dei zombies under Gibsonian lock and key. Movie lovers all have their capital-G Grails. ![]()
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