“Time Without Pity” (which I discuss in this clip) was shot in London in 1956 by the American director Joseph Losey, working with a script by the American screenwriter Ben Barzman, both of whom had left the country due to Congress’s political inquisitions and the studios’ resultant blacklisting. Its political import is built into its suspense: a young man is about to be executed for a murder to which he is linked only circumstantially and of which he seems to be manifestly innocent. Meanwhile, his father, a literary wreck who had cavalierly destroyed his relationship with his son, comes back to London in a last-minute attempt to save him. The political elements of the story (which finds the judicial system in the pocket of a dissolute, corrupt businessman) connect with another, more pervasive, more universal, and, ultimately, more radical vision of generational battles that arise from existential despair: the struggle to reconcile oneself to a broken world that draws on the past to harness the virtuous to perpetuate the evil. Losey stands beside Nicholas Ray (whom he knew from their youth in Wisconsin and with whom he later worked in the theatre) and Vincente Minnelli as a poet of lost youth. He was a master of cinematic depression, which comes off, in his view, as a depressingly rational response to a seemingly irreparable world. For further viewing: try “These Are the Damned,” “The Boy with Green Hair,” and “The Prowler.”
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
Dept. of Medicine
How to Die in Good Health
The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. Peter Attia argues that it doesn’t have to be this way.
By Dhruv Khullar
Infinite Scroll
The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher
Byung-Chul Han, in treatises such as “The Burnout Society” and his latest, “The Crisis of Narration,” diagnoses the frenetic aimlessness of the digital age.
By Kyle Chayka
Daily Comment
The Supreme Court Asks What Enron Has to Do with January 6th—and Trump
The former President notwithstanding, the government’s position in Fischer v. United States is unsettling.
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
Elements
The Highest Tree House in the Amazon
In 2023, conservationists and carpenters converged on Peru to build luxury accommodations in the rain-forest canopy.
By Allison Keeley