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Ann Dvorak's Big Future

Two Little Girls with Big Futures! "The passage of time has been very kind to Three on a Match and Ann Dvorak, as the film now is considered a quintessential pre-Code classic, complete with sex, drugs, booze, skin, kidnapping, suicide, and magnified nose-hair plucking. For modern audiences aware of the ultra-sanitized scenarios that would plague American films for decades once the Production Code was aggressively enforced, Three on a Match stands out as a delightfully shocking and racy example of early 1930s Hollywood. Ann is only mildly effective as the society wife but comes to dominate the film once her downfall begins, and the train wreck that is Vivian Revere is mesmerizing. Any pent-up nervous energy Ann may have had in real life is unleashed through Vivian and she isn’t afraid to look like hell to bring this character to life. In one scene, as she waits for Blondell to exit a beauty parlor in order to hit her up for cash, Ann appears emaciated with dark circles under her ey...
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Marebito (Takashi Shimizu, 2004)

 



"While the Western approach to the study of strangers has centered around the social sciences, Japanese scholars have traditionally studied the subject from folkloric, historical, literary, and religious points of view. The Japanese folkloric and literary scholar Orikuchi (1929/1975) academically resurrected the ancient term marebito/marōdo as "a rare guest, a god, or a goddess" from a place remote from rural hamlets and communities. 

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During the Japanese Chusei (Middle Ages, 1185-1602), the marebito came to be regarded as a divine-secular and fortunate-unfortunate ambivalent being whom local residents would treat with ambivalent hospitality and hostility. For they expected marebito strangers from an unknown out-world to bring fortunes and prosperity but at the same time feared that such strange visitors might be dreadful oni (ogres or ogresses) or yokai (monsters) who would cause unhappy incidents such as epidemic diseases, famines, and natural disasters (Ishigami, 1983; Orikuchi, 1929/1975). These welcome-nonwelcome and inclusion-exclusion ambivalent attitudes of the indigenenous residents toward the marebito could be extensively applied to later Japanese people's general attitudes toward the ijin and the gaijin from overseas (Miyata,1986). Orikuchi's (1929/1975) resurrection, proposition, and postulate of the marebito as one of the most ancient and deep seated layers of Japanese culture have thus continued to exert strong impacts on historical approaches to the study of Japanese cultural anthropology, history, literature, psychology, and religion as well as folklore (Ito, 1987; Komatsu, 1985; Kubota, 1997; Oimatsu, 1997; Okano, 1960)."

By Satoshi Ishii, from Japan Review, 2001, No. 13 (2001), pp. 145-170.

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