“Algren” – All in [MOVIE REVIEW]
Norman Algren outside the Monarch Bar. Photo courtesy of Art Shay and First Run Productions. The first thing I did after watching Michael Caplan’s exceptional documentary on writer Nelson Algren was run upstairs to my library to see if I had any of his work. I remember the paperback copy of The Man with the Golden Arm on my parents’ bookshelf and its lurid, sensationalistic cover of the dish in the negligee on a bed awaiting her tough guy lover about to shoot up. Such were the early covers of “Pocket Books” to entice readers with a false sense of what was contained inside and to stand out on the rotating wire racks found everywhere from drugstores (as in Gordon Lightfoot and “just like a paperback novel, the kind the drugstore sells”) and the five and dime. With Algren’s literature, and make no mistake, it was literature, it wasn’t misleading. Alas, I didn’t have a copy, the original lost to time and cheap construction (another hallmark of Pocket Books” in order to make them affordable to all). Caplan, a director/writer with few previous credits has produced an extraordinary portrait of a major author who has fallen into the realm of the forgotten despite his many successes…
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