An American, Jonathan Littell, on Monday won France's top literary prize, the Goncourt, for his novel "Les Bienveillantes" (The Kindly Ones, or The Well-Meaning Ones), about a fictional SS officer's memoirs.

The prize jury said Littell's debut novel easily triumphed over a field of three other works from French authors with a 7-3 vote.

The book is already a sensation in France, where it sits atop the best-seller list with more than 250,000 copies sold.

Littell, the 39-year-old son of US journalist and spy novel writer Robert Littell, was not present to receive the honour.

His French editor said he remained at his home in Barcelona, Spain, and transmitted a message saying "he prefers to stay out of the limelight."

Littell "is very happy and he accepts this prize with pleasure," added Antoine Gallimard, of the Gallimard publishing house, stressing that no form of disrespect was intended by his absence.

"He has no time for publicity, partly out of shyness, but also because he believes literature is not an entertainment industry. What is important is the book itself," Gallimard said, adding that another 150,000 copies would now be printed.

Born in New York in 1967, Littell moved to France and spent his childhood there until the age of 18, when he returned to the United States for university.

After graduating, he spent 15 years travelling around the world, much of it working for humanitarian organisations.

Fully bilingual, he wrote his 900-page book in France, though admitted that he wrote up much of his methodical research in English.

"Les Bienveillantes" has already won a prestigious Academie Francaise prize given to first-time authors writing in French.

It is soon to be translated and published in Britain, the United States and other countries after auctions believed to have netted Littell more than a million dollars.

The novel tells the story of an unrepetant Nazi SS officer who recounts his extermination of Jews in World War II.

"What interested me was to understand what led people to become torturers," Littell has said in one of his rare interviews.

The premise, though, has earned criticism from some quarters, and a German historian, Peter Schottler, has called the book inaccurate and unconvincing.

The head of the Goncourt jury, Edmonde Charles-Roux, brushed those views aside, enthusiastically endorsing Littell's book after Monday's vote.

"You can't dismiss such a monument," he said.

"The vote was definitive, as it always is for the Goncourt. It was very sharp: some for, others against, but it was even so an impressive vote," Charles-Roux said.

A jury member, Jorge Semprun, said he was "stunned by this amazing book -- it's the literary event of this half-century."

Littell's triumph was the high point of an invasion of foreign writers who have invigorated France's often staid literary world by sweeping several top prizes.

When CEO Harry Sloan gives visitors a tour of MGM's airy executive offices on the 14th floor of the MGM Tower in Century City, he enjoys pointing out an antique document in one of the display cases. The paper in question is the founding agreement that Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and director D.W. Griffith signed in 1919 when they decided to take control of their careers by joining to create their own motion picture company, the United Artists Corp.

Until Thursday, that old contract appeared more a historical artifact than a template for the future. But in announcing that it has struck a deal with Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner to revive UA, MGM said it was harkening back to UA's storied history as a filmmaker-friendly "place where producers, writers, directors and actors can thrive in a creative environment."

UA, which has earned nine best picture Oscars, has occupied a unique if sometimes embattled spot in Hollywood history. And its legacy is remembered fondly.

It’s been some time since the Kennedy name has been a simple code word for hope, courage, social justice and the like. In America’s pop obsession with the illustrious family, the name in recent years has more often hit the headlines for scandal and tragedy, accident or addiction.

But rehabilitation of a sort is at hand if Emilio Estevez, an unabashed Kennedy admirer who wrote and directed “Bobby,” has his way. Mr. Estevez’s drama about the night of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination as he sought the presidential nomination in 1968, is scheduled for release on Nov. 17.

In the film a kaleidoscope of renowned actors — Martin Sheen (Mr. Estevez’s father), Harry Belafonte, Sharon Stone, Laurence Fishburne, Demi Moore — play unremarkable, fictional people whose lives intersect at the moment of Kennedy’s shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

As for the candidate, Mr. Estevez chose to portray him only in newsreels from the time, and only in the most flattering light: striding through Appalachia with poverty-stricken families, championing civil rights, wading through crowds of awestruck supporters, holding forth on high-minded ideals as he did in his very last speech: “Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it.”

In November 2006, the New-York Historical Society will launch its second major exhibition on the topic of New York's relationship to slavery and the abolitionist movement. The focus of the second exhibition will be on New York's rise to national and global economic power as the nation itself confronted slavery and racial inequality. The period under investigation will begin about 1815 and continue through the Civil War and its aftermath. Although hundreds of significant works of art, objects and documents will be on display primarily from N-YHS collection, this exhibition will have a special focus on lithography, photography and book illustrations to emphasize that New York City, as the nation's publishing center, had a very special role in the formulating of images on both sides of the sectional dispute in the 1850s.

THE film director who was fired by telegram midway through shooting his sequel to Superman is to finally release his version of the film after nearly 30 years. Richard Donner, who was replaced as director of Superman II after a spectacular falling out with his producers, will release his director’s cut of the film on November 20.

The new version, which includes 15 minutes of previously unseen footage of Marlon Brando playing Superman’s father, is radically different from the cinema release. Donner has also inserted footage from screen tests to substitute for scenes that he did not have time to shoot. One restored sequence involves Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego, being tricked by his girlfriend into revealing his secret identity.

In the theatrical release, Kent gives away his secret when he accidentally places his hand in a fire but does not get burnt. Donner’s version shows Kent reacting with superhero speed when Lois Lane, his girlfriend, shoots at him with a gun loaded with blanks.

[Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.]

The movie star Warren Beatty, like so many people these days, is getting old, and with the hot breath of mortality on the back of his wattled neck he has undertaken the large project of reclaiming his reputation as a maker of movies. And not a moment too soon, either. Beatty's last several pictures have ranged from the kind that barely break even (Bulworth) to the kind that break the bank--calamitous, apocalyptic commercial failures like Love Affair, costarring Pierce Brosnan and Annette Bening, and Town and Country, costarring Goldie Hawn and Garry Shandling. In fact, it's difficult to find anyone in the continental United States who has watched either of these last two Beatty movies anywhere but in an airplane, and even then many passengers were reported to have jumped rather than watch Garry Shandling cuddle Goldie Hawn. Those two aren't getting any younger, either.

So now we who survived Town and Country are being asked to make room for Reds, the 1981 historical epic that Beatty produced, cowrote, directed, and starred in. For some reason Reds has never been released on home video, and although no one seems to have complained about this, Beatty and Paramount Home Entertainment are rolling out a 25th anniversary double DVD this month, with as much fanfare as they can muster. The new discs pile several hours of additional material on top of the movie's original running time of three-and-a-half hours. When a promotional preview copy arrived unbidden in the mail the other week, I was surprised to discover that Reds was worth watching, or rewatching, if only for clinical reasons. It's a period piece, of course, but in a complicated way: It's a window into the past--a window into a 1970s window into the teens, to be specific, and a relic of the kind of leftism that has already faded, though the hangover remains.

Reds tells the story of John Reed, played by Beatty, and his wife Louise Bryant, played by Diane Keaton. Reed, if he's remembered today at all--and he wasn't much remembered in 1981, either--is known as the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, an energetic account of the Russian Revolution. Vladimir Lenin himself wrote the book's introduction. Reed covered the revolution as a highly sympathetic, and highly paid, magazine correspondent. Later, before his death in 1920 at age 33, he became more directly involved, as an American member of the First Comintern. Reed was a courageous adventurer, a vivid writer, and a keen observer. He was not, however, terribly scrupulous in what he recorded. His friend Bertram Wolfe, later to become the great Sovietologist, recalled a mutual acquaintance once reproaching Reed for exaggeration in his reporting:

"But it didn't happen that way!" said the painter friend.

"What the hell difference does it make?" said Reed. He was a painter, too, he said--one who disdained "photographic accuracy" in favor of an "over-all impression."

In politics he was just as gauzy. He knew nothing of economics, socialism, Russian history, or the Russian language, and though he didn't understand capitalism he despised it, for all the usual good-hearted reasons. He fell hard for any strongman who seemed to him embarked on a grand project to remake society and lift up the working man. His politics were ambidextrous: For Reed, Mussolini no less than Lenin pointed the way to a brighter dawn. Well-meaning, ignorant, talented, romantic--he was, in other words, a bit of a booby. Growing up, Warren Beatty idolized him.

As director and screenwriter, Beatty applied Reed's reportorial principle--forgo accuracy for the big picture--to the telling of Reed's adventures. In a notice about the movie's rerelease, a reviewer for the New York Times called Reds a "superior history lesson," which just goes to show how badly Times movie reviewers need a history lesson. It is much easier to make the case that Reds is a grand work of the cinematic art, which it isn't, than that it's an adequate means of conveying accurate information about John Reed or the revolution. Crucial events are telescoped or ignored, characters invented or reimagined, chronologies upended. Scenes that never happened--such as a final confrontation between Reed's wife Louise and her sometime lover Eugene O'Neill, played by Jack Nicholson--become pivot points in the plot.

And it's not as though Beatty was in such a rush he didn't have time to get the story straight. He began working on a screenplay about his hero not long after his breakout movie Bonnie and Clyde, in 1967. This was at the dawn of Radical Chic, when a left-wing movie glamorizing a fellow-traveling, Mussolini-loving American pseudo-Communist--a prime example of one of Lenin's "useful idiots"--might have seemed like a terrific idea; edgy, even. In a new interview included in the DVD release, Beatty mentions that he was inspired to do the movie by what he calls (still!) "the mistaken American paranoia about Communism." He hired the British playwright Trevor Griffiths, a foam-flecked Marxist propagandist, to help him write the screenplay.

Unluckily for them, between the original inspiration in 1967 and the release of the movie in 1981, a terrible thing happened: the 1970s. From Angola to Vietnam to Cambodia to Afghanistan, Communism looked less romantic by the day, and even for some leftists, "fellow traveling" took on a slightly sinister cast. Paranoid Americans elected as their president a Baptist scold who, upon taking office, turned around and began lecturing them about their "inordinate fear of Communism." Meanwhile, the film production ground on, and by the time of its release in 1981 Americans had kicked out the Baptist scold in favor of a president who gave every indication of believing we really would all be better dead than red.

Tossed by these ideological crosscurrents--from Radical Chic to detente to Reaganism--Beatty apparently suffered a failure of nerve. The politics of Reds are a muddle of feints and hesitations and unexplored inferences. As the great movie critic Richard Grenier pointed out at its release, its point of view is best described as "anti-anti-Communist," not so morally obtuse as to be pro-Communist but disdainful above all of anyone who disdained Communism with unseemly zeal. Beatty takes much greater care, for instance, demonstrating the creepiness of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, father of America's first Red Scare in the late teens and early 1920s, than portraying any lapse of the Bolsheviks.

By most accounts, Reed himself had grown disillusioned with the Revolution at the end of his life. Beatty hints at the disenchantment but seems unsure of its cause. Reed is shown objecting strenuously to a Bolshevik functionary who has rewritten one of his dispatches, after which Reed never quite rekindles the old revolutionary fire. A hack myself, I sympathize. I hate it when that happens. But as a source of disillusionment, "They messed with my copy" doesn't compare with "They're liquidating two million kulaks."

With his politics so uncertain--or OTB (overtaken by events) as the journalists say--Beatty decided, instead, to make a movie about sex. Here's where the re-release of Reds has much of its contemporary interest, inadvertent though it is. While he was developing Reds, Beatty made two movies, Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, that celebrated his status as a swordsman of world-historical achieve ments. Reds gave him the chance to reconcile his progressivism with his priapism--which is also, when you think about it, what the entire New Left was trying to do in the 1970s, too. The movie catches him at the zenith of his pulchritude. Unfortunately, it catches Diane Keaton, playing his wife, at the zenith of looking like Diane Keaton. Yet old photos show Reed to have been an oafish-looking, potatoey fellow, while Bryant was often described as a great beauty. Maybe Beatty should have played her instead.

People who recall the movie from 1981 may be surprised to discover that Louise, not Reed, is at the movie's heart. It begins and ends with her. In real life, however, whatever her looks, Louise Bryant was a much less appealing person than Reed, and much less interesting. By turns an aspiring poet, journalist, artist, and model, she dumped her first husband to follow Reed to New York City, where they set up house in the center of a colony of Greenwich Village bohos. She worked his journalism contacts to build a career of her own. It never quite panned out. She had none of Reed's talent, none of his insouciance or large-heartedness. But the ideology of Free Love--redubbed sexual liberation 50 years later--offered compensations. She took several lovers on the side, including O'Neill, at the time her husband's best friend. She dumped them, too, when she followed Reed to Russia in hopes of advancing her career. And while he grew uneasy as the revolution curdled, she accommodated herself to Leninism quite easily.

She wrote admiringly, for example, of Feliks Dzerzhinski, founder of the Soviet secret police: "It was his duty to see that the prisoners were quickly and humanely disposed of. He performed this grim task with a dispatch and an efficiency for which even the condemned must have been grateful, in that nothing is more horrible than an executioner whose hand trembles and whose heart wavers."

From this sour, unpromising material, Beatty tried to fashion Louise into a feminist ideal, an independent woman and early career gal, whose sex life was omnivorous, earnest, politically potent, and, by the look of it, not much fun at all. The Louise of Reds is as much of a stud as Beatty was in real life, but her studliness is a means to personal liberation. While the God of socialism was failing, on screen and off, Louise holds out a separate set of possibilities. In retrospect, Keaton's performance stands as the high-water mark of a certain kind of feminism, and--wonderful to say--it's the most anachronistic thing in the movie. In 1981 she was supposed to look self-actualized, noble, and worthy of emulation. Now, in the post-feminist age, where the most wholesome elements of feminism have been widely absorbed while others, less wholesome, have been discarded, Louise comes off as shrill, impetuous, self-centered, grandstanding, hedonistic, irresponsible--a mess.

The sexual revolution, we now know, didn't turn out any better than the Russian one. Of course, there's no way that Warren Beatty, of all people, could have figured on that in 1981. He probably thought he was pointing the way to a brighter dawn. Now this creaky old flick captures something else: The moment when sex displaced socialism as the ideological preoccupation of the left--another signpost, confidently directing all who would follow it to another dead end.

It seems to happen every decade or so.

In 1979, eight years after the death of the Doors' magnetic frontman Jim Morrison, the band's song"The End" seared the psyche of moviegoers during the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola's landmark Vietnam epic,"Apocalypse Now."

Then in 1991, Oliver Stone's Doors biopic relit the fire of interest in the band, recalls manager Jeff Jampol, commenting on the Doors' enduring and cyclical popularity.

Now, the band's surviving members -- keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore -- are preparing to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their 1967 self-titled debut album with a wealth of activities to spark interest in the band among a new generation.

On tap: a new boxed set, the band's first authorized biography and a push into areas ranging from ringtones to a theatrical production in Las Vegas that will feature the group's music.

[Alvaro Vargas Llosa is director of The Center on Global Prosperity at The Independent Institute. He is a native of Peru and received his B.S.C. in international history from the London School of Economics.]

Most of the reviews of Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” salute the movie as a powerful work of art whose message is that war, whether of choice or necessity, is always horrific.

Actually, it does a lot more than that. It tells us that war tends to involve a double act of predation: the one each warring side inflicts on the other and the one the government—and that vast latticework of interests hidden under the guise of patriotism—inflicts on those who do the fighting and on the rest of society back home.

The first kind of predation is blatant and easily understood, even if it means a country is ready to pay a high price in order to achieve a worthy goal. The other type is more subtle: It is not measured in corpses, it does not take place on the battlefield and it blurs the borderline that separates good and evil. In that respect, war can compromise the moral rectitude even of those who fight for the good cause.

The film, based on James Bradley’s book of the same title, focuses on the men who raised a flag atop Mount Suribachi, the highest mountain on Iwo Jima, on the fifth day of the American assault on the Japanese island in 1945. The picture taken by an Associated Press photographer who has no inkling of the events that will be triggered by his camera is quickly seized upon by the American establishment and becomes a powerful propaganda tool at home. The three surviving raisers of the flag are enlisted as the patriotic symbols of a war-bond drive the government conducts in order to continue to fund its efforts.

There is fraud and deceit at every stage. The flag raised in the picture is not the original flag but a replacement ordered by a commander eager to keep the real one; none of the three survivors of the picture paraded by the government around the nation are real heroes nor do they see themselves as such—they were taken out of the battlefield long before the conclusion of the struggle so they could participate in the propaganda campaign; and, finally, one of the men named in the picture was not really there. The fact that he was one of the men who raised the original flag—the one that was not photographed—only serves to stress the theatrical nature of the ploy.

Individuals that they are, the three surviving Marines deal in unique and different ways with the collective farce they are asked to set in motion in order to bring the nation under the patriotic spell. One is happy to go along with the lie, but eventually realizes the very people who fete him are unwilling to give him a hand once the fervor of the war passes; the other is driven to drink and then death by the psychological torture of what he has seen on and off the battlefield; the third one survives—unhappy, guilty, repressed—to eventually help his own son, the author of “Flags of Our Fathers,” tell the story.

Clint Eastwood’s genius consists of rendering an equally poignant and disturbing picture of the two wars—the relentless savagery going on in the battlefield, where American and Japanese soldiers are engaged in primeval brutality that resulted in 27,000 deaths, and the damage that those conducting the politics of the conflict inflict on the truth back home by bamboozling the public into the perception that war is a beautiful expression of nationhood. ...

Once they were the pride of ancient civilisations: mighty cities, fortresses, temples and ziggurats. But time, weather and man have left them in ruins.

Now their glory can be seen in aerial photographs which go on display at the British Museum next month.

The show, The Past from Above, demonstrates, like Shelley's poem Ozymandias ? "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains" ? the impermanence of man's labour. The damage caused by nature, dams, treasure-hunters, farming, mass tourism and wreckers is evident in many of the images, says Lesley Fitton, co-curator of the exhibition.

The photographs of sites in Iraq, such as the Temple of Gareus, the ziggurat at Ur and the 11th century fortress Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, may be the last, most complete views of the ruins. Archaeologists fear bombing or looting may have caused serious damage.

A photograph taken in 1973 of the huts of marsh dwellers in Iraq is an historic view. The settlement was destroyed when Saddam Hussein diverted the Euphrates after an uprising after the Kuwait war. The 100-plus pictures are by the Swiss photographer Georg Gerster.

Images range from Greek and Roman remains; sand dunes covering the 13th century Qalat-I Gird round fortress in Iran; pyramids, Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia; native Indian settlements in north America; Inca and Aztec temples in south America; ancient settlements in Africa; and a surprisingly large number of views of Britain, among them, Maiden Castle in Dorset and the White Horse of Uffington, Oxfordshire.
# The Past from Above, Nov 16 to Feb 11.