By Anne Levin
On April 2, Morven Museum & Garden got welcome news from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): The museum was being awarded a grant of $25,000 to help support an interpretive plan addressing Morven’s history of slavery when it was owned by two generations of the Stockton family.
But a few days later, another communication arrived from the federal agency. The grant was being rescinded, it said, because it “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes.” Citing some statutes, the email continued that the NEH “is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
The letter arrived in an email, at midnight. more
I’d agree with Agee if I hadn’t just seen Fields at his flinching, cringing, fumbling, pugnacious, masterfully disoriented best in the 1926 silent The Old Army Game, which also offered actual visual details (cars, stores, streets, small town America) to compare to the period recreation in Paramount’s recent series 1923. Given Chaplin’s immense popularity in those days, it was interesting to watch his 1923 silent feature The Pilgrim alongside Taylor Sheridan’s brilliant prequel to Yellowstone at a time when theaters all over the country, including one in Billings, Montana, would have been screening the latest Chaplin. And since The Pilgrim opened in New York in late February 1923, I’m taking the liberty of installing it in a Times Square movie house on the day that 1923’s embattled heroine Alexandra Dutton arrived in America.
