Quotes from Stefan Kanfer

Kenney knows two essential truths about melodrama: First that it is most powerful when combined with irony and understatement; and second that it is a salient feature of modern life.

An aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.

The American Film Institute ranked him as the Greatest Male Star in cinema history. The honors were only beginning. In 1997 Entertainment Weekly designated Humphrey the Number One Movie Legend of all time. That year the United States Postal Service issued a stamp bearing his liken

In the early 1950s the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tried something old. Like many another venue for productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw, the Brattle had become a film house in the early 1950s. But it was a film house unlike any other. It had a rear-screen projector, rather than the standard setup that beamed movies on a screen above the audience. And it had owners who believed that the past could be more alluring than the present.

You know, it's a peculiar thing. At funerals one's inclined to laugh; and at weddings, weep.