Category: Personal
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The First Memory of My Father
June 21, 2022 My first memory of my father is on a golf course. We were living in Prairie Village, Kansas. Our house was modest, and our street was full of young children for me to play with especially a cute girl across the street, named, no kidding, Bambi. (She challenged me to kiss her…
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Senator Feinstein, Is There Anything You Won’t Say or Do?
Deal W. Hudson September 24, 2018 Dear Sen. Dianne Feinstein, I am writing to you to ask a simple question, Is there anything, morally speaking, you just would not do? I ask because what you are doing to Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee is something I could never do, no matter how much I detested…
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When Catholics Lost Their Cultural Clout — A Lesson for Today
Deal W. Hudson September 21, 2018 Catholics of my generation probably only dimly remember, if at all, the furor provoked among Catholics by films in the 1950s directed by Luis Buñuel, Los Olivados (1950); Roberto Rossellini, The Miracle (1951); Otto Preminger, The Moon is Blue (1953); Elia Kazan, Baby Doll (1956); Roger Vadim, And God…
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Ten Books That Have Taught Me About America
Deal W. Hudson July 4, 2018 Though I have not read as widely in American history as I should have, some books have remained with me since I read them. They have shaped for me a deeper understanding and appreciation of my native country. I’m not going to list some of the obvious suspects such…
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Remembering My Father — How John Wayne Grew Old
Deal W. Hudson June 6, 2018 He was the strongest man I ever knew. He had will-power of iron. The doctor said to stop smoking. After that day he never smoked another cigarette. Years later a different doctor banned alcohol—not another drink passed his lips for more than thirty years. Of all the money he…
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When Elgar turned to the Druids
Deal W. Hudson April 11, 2019 The conductor Martyn Brabbins and Hyperion have given us the second complete recording of Elgar’s 1898 cantata Caractacus. It’s been more than 25 years since the first recording by Richard Hickox on Chandos (1994). Caractacus is an uneven work but possesses enough moments of raw power and pastoral beauty…
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You need to watch this German masterpiece
Deal W. Hudson February 28, 2019 Never Look Away tells kind of the story that invites superlatives and deserves them. Based upon the life of painter Gerhard Richter, it tells the story of an artist who lives through the Nazi horror and the communist stranglehold, then escapes to West Berlin where, after much trial and error,…
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Films that take you into the wilderness with Jesus
Deal W. Hudson March 14, 2019 It’s hard to understand why any director making a film about Jesus would ignore the face-off with Lucifer. Cecil B DeMille has his mind elsewhere in his 1927 King of Kings. Himself succumbing to carnal temptation, DeMille opens his film with a barely clad Mary Magdalene, now a prostitute…
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The extraordinary power of ‘transcendental’ films
Deal W. Hudson January 24, 2019 Deal Hudson on the shattering effect of movies that defy our expectations In 1971, Paul Schrader, a film student at UCLA, published a book called Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Although he was only 24 years old, his theory of “transcendental style” – expressed in formal academic language…
Deal W. Hudson 