All Things in Moderation

Posting this a bit early, as I think there will be no MP this morning.

1996 – After two children and 15 years of marriage, the Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana, formally agree to a divorce. The couple had already been separated for four years, and had been negotiating for over 6 months on a final settlement. Almost a year to the day later, on August 31, 1997, Diana will be killed in a car crash in Paris. Charles will eventually go on to marry his long-time mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, in 2005. The news of the divorce produced much sadness among many followers of the British Royal family, but for those of us who have always considered the royal family to be an expensive and foolish anachronism, we couldn’t have cared less.

1963 – On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a speech to 250,000 people who had come for the March on Washington, demanding voting rights and an end to racial segregation. The speech, popularly known as the I Have A Dream speech, will be delivered 8 years to the day of the racially charged murder of Emmett Till (see below) and will come to be seen as one of the most famous and stirring speeches in American history.

1955 – Emmett Till a black teenager from Chicago visiting family in Money, Mississippi, is brutally beaten, shot in the head, and dumped into the Tallahatchie River. His mangled body will be found 3 days later. Till was killed by Roy Bryant, the husband of a white woman with whom Till was reported to have flirted a few days earlier, and JW Milam. Till’s uncle, Mose Wright, positively identifies the two men who took Till from Wright’s house on the night of the murder, but a jury will acquit the two men nonetheless, on the grounds that the mangled body could not be positively identified as Till. A year after the acquittal, protected by double jeopardy laws, the two will admit to and describe the murder to Look magazine. Till’s murder and the subsequent outrage over the verdict is regarded as a pivotal event in the history of the then infant Civil Rights movement.

1948 – Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope opens in theaters. Inspired by the true murder committed by Loeb and Leopold, Rope depicts the story of 2 young men who, just for kicks, murder their “friend” and then hold a dinner party with the trunk holding the body as the center piece of the party. Starring Jimmy Stewart, the film is best known for the absence of many conventional cuts, as large portions of the film are shot as a single, continuous scene. Although a canister of film could only hold 10 minutes of film, several scenes last for well over 10 minutes, which was accomplished by timing movements so that as the canister ran out, an actor would walk past the front of the camera, briefly blacking it out, allowing the change of the canister to occur without an obvious cut in the action. Hitchcock apparently didn’t like the film, and called it a failed experiment, but it is one of my favorite Hitchcock films. Interestingly, the initial scene shown in the trailer below isn’t actually in the film at all.

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