IV Horn

Jack Spengler was born in Buffalo, New York in 1930. He shares his decades with a lightness that feels almost subversive in a climate that so often feels like rain on the day you planned the picnic—even testing the dispositions of those who keep the glass a quarter full and steady eyes on the silver linings behind unexpected clouds. Jack carries a pragmatic joy, as if he shook hands with what he couldn’t control, making friends with both rain and sunshine. He jokes about skipping school with...

I have endeavoured, in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it! Their faithful friend and Servant, C.D. December 1843. To the Victorians, the forces of cruelty felt as insurmountable as they do today—living within and alongside institutions that sustained the few and blamed the many who depended on them....

No other film bridges the sacred and the profane quite like Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), a Depression-era fairy tale that ends one cinematic age and inaugurates another, painted in all the shades of nostalgia Norman Rockwell left out when depicting the past. Part noir, part parable, it is a story of flight and faith, innocence, and inheritance, revealing the uneasy marriage between American piety and spectacle — a theme that would echo throughout postwar cinema. The...