An old movie...

to start the month off right...  Well, a short old movie anyway.  I haven't seen it in years - but I have always fondly remembered this film as a work of cinematic brilliance.  Now, mind you, I saw it for the first time in high school in an American lit class - just before reading the short story upon which it is based, so take that into consideration.  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a great example of the stream-of-consciousness device in both fiction and film.  Didn't that sound scholarly?  I guess that means I still haven't lost it - that $32,000 piece of paper in my closet is still worth something.  Ambrose Bierce, famed Civil War era reporter and curmudgeon, wrote the story some time before he took up with Pancho Villa and joined the Mexican Revolution only to disappear into Mexico never to be heard from again.  (You can see a fictionalized version of Bierce's last days in Old Gringo.)  Anyhow, without giving the film or the story away, the action of the piece takes place in the main character's mind.  (Another good example of this style of writing is The Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Katherine Anne Porter.  A bizarre example is James Joyce's Ulysses - but I don't even want to go there.  Ever again.)  My seventeen year old mind was mesmerized by the film's ending and I never forgot it; I saw it again years later as an episode of the Twilight Zone.  I'd been wondering if it was available on DVD ever since I'd watched Old Gringo and sure enough, Netflix had it.   One click and a couple of days later, it was in my hands.  I have to say that I enjoyed watching An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge as much tonight as I did over thirty years ago.