Re: "between Vladimir Nabokov’s 'Lolita' and Thomas Pynchon’s V' "

[Robert Mahnke]

I was going to toss in Walter van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident, which
gets at some of the same themes.  But now I see that it was first published
in 1940, and that it's the edition I read that was published in 1962.  So,
as Gilda Radner would say, never mind.

On 10/17/09, Doug Millison <dougmillison at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> “THE Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” John Ford’s great, autumnal western,
> dramatizes a moment of historical transition. No one involved quite knows it
> at the time, but the shooting that gives the film its title — the ambiguous
> slaying of a bad guy played by Lee Marvin — is a pivot on which the fate of
> a half-civilized frontier territory turns. A brutal code of justice,
> personified by John Wayne’s gunman, gives way to a social order based on law
> and political legitimacy, represented by James Stewart’s character, an
> aspiring lawyer who will eventually become a United States senator.
>
> An old way of life expires as a new one is born. The process can be violent
> or gradual, vivid or subtle. It can be depicted with nostalgia for the world
> that is lost, an enthusiastic embrace of progress or, most often, with an
> ambivalent mixture of both. This kind of change is the subject of many of
> Ford’s westerns, but “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” shot in black and
> white and mostly on studio sets (rather than in open-air Technicolor like
> “The Searchers”), presents the theme with especially stark clarity.
>
> A similar subject is addressed, on a much grander scale and with a
> different (you might say more British) range of nuances, in David Lean’s
> “Lawrence of Arabia,” which tracks, through the complicated career of its
> title character, both the emergence of Arab nationalism and the unraveling
> of British imperial ambition. And the Fordian notion of the American West as
> the place in the modern world where traditional virtues go to die echoes
> through “Ride the High Country,” an early film by Sam Peckinpah, who would
> go on to become Ford’s heir and, in some ways, his antithesis.
>
> What these three movies have in common, beyond a shared historical
> perspective, is that they all arrived on American movie screens at more or
> less the same time, in 1962. They are thus part of a moment — those anxious,
> exuberant, transitional years between the Sputnik launch and the Kennedy
> assassination, or maybe between Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Thomas
> Pynchon’s “V” — that is enjoying its season in the
> retro-revisionist-pop-cultural sun. …
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/movies/18scot.html
>
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