When these two leaders reach each other, they explode and become what is normally referenced to as lightning.”Īs for that myth that lightning never strikes twice? Linguists say it’s actually just a metaphor to illustrate how rare it is for something spectacular to happen to a person more than once. “A second leader comes up from the ground, usually a tree or other tall structure, as positive and negative charges attract to each other. “A stepped leader is the electricity from the sky and clouds trying to find the easiest way to the ground, often taking steps, twists and turns to get to there,” Jonathan Belles, a meteorologist, explained.
Those charges in turn can lead to a highly electrically conducive plasma channel, which makes it way to the ground in channels called lightning leaders. It starts when ice crystals collide in a thundercloud and create electrical charges.
Vidor’s imposing imagery-constructed around the wide-open expanses and distant mountains that characterize the setting-situates the overwrought emotions within a stark, eerily underpopulated environment where one must make oneself larger than life to make any sort of impact on other people.To put it simply, lightning is basically a giant electrical charge.
Lightning strikes twice movie#
(Incidentally, Lightning star Ruth Roman would later play a major character on Knots Landing.) But, to quote Kehr, give the movie an ounce of respect and you’ll discover a remarkable aesthetic object. The heavy dose of glamor, overacting, and ludicrous plot twists anticipates such 80s prime time soaps as Dallas and Dynasty. Was it the landowner’s unctuous best friend? The headstrong neighboring rancher played by Mercedes McCambridge four years before she took a similar role in Johnny Guitar? And why are both suspects sexually ambiguous? To prove her love for him-and to dispel her doubts-she determines to find out who really committed the crime. She meets, then quickly falls for, a wealthy landowner who’s just been acquitted of murdering his wife. After her doctor orders her to take a sabbatical, a failed stage actress (reduced to touring the plains with a fleabag troupe) hits the road and winds up in a small, isolated Texas town. The film shares a screenwriter, Lenore Coffee, with Vidor’s previous feature, the Bette Davis showcase Beyond the Forest, and like that film, everything here is deliberately, almost cartoonishly over-the-top.
Lightning strikes twice archive#
Thanks to the Warner Archive Collection and the Chicago Public Library, I recently caught up with Lighting Strikes Twice, a melodrama that Vidor made for Warner Bros.
Lightning strikes twice series#
If you’re digging the current Dietrich/von Sternberg retrospective at the Music Box, then you might enjoy looking into late Vidor when that series ends. Case in point: while quite a few of King Vidor’s silent and early sound films ( The Big Parade, The Crowd, Our Daily Bread) are widely considered to be classics, almost all of the features he directed after Duel in the Sun-among them Ruby Gentry and Man Without a Star-remain near-exclusive causes of Vidor diehards and camp enthusiasts. That’s not to say that auteurist critics succeeded in redeeming every major Hollywood filmmaker who skirted camp.
.jpg "lightning strikes twice")
Nowadays Kehr’s staunch auteurist defense no longer represents a minority critical position, as von Sternberg is hardly the contentious figure he once was. “It’s possible to look at this film and see nothing but camp, but give it an ounce of respect and you’ll discover a remarkable aesthetic object-an exercise in mise-en-scene of an awesome, glacial beauty.” That’s how Dave Kehr described Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored (which screens twice this weekend) when he wrote it up for the Reader some decades ago.
0 kommentar(er)
