The movie's star, Lillian Gish, suffered frostbite that afflicted her for the rest of her life, but she did not quit taking physically risky roles. For Victor Sjöström's 1928 drama "The Wind," Gish was placed in the Mojave Desert: "Sand was blown at me by eight airplane propellers," she later wrote in her autobiography, and she was "in danger of having my eyes put out." The Biblical flood in Michael Curtiz's 1928 film "Noah's Ark" was so intense involving at least six hundred thousand gallons of water-that the movie's star Dolores Costello was knocked unconscious and reportedly caught pneumonia; extras in the scene were rumored to have been killed.
The development of special effects and specialized stunt performance, which made swift advances in the nineteenthirties, was a mark of progress. Neither life nor limb should be risked for the making of a movie. But the result is that we no longer experience onscreen disaster as viscerally as we did the freezing waters of "Way Down East." Modern audiences are in the know about the trickery that simulates great dangers. Films must find creative ways to arouse thrills.
"Twisters," like its 1996 predecessor,
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AFFINITY COMEDY
The state of the Netflix standup special.
DUTY DANCING
How Seamus Heaney wrote his way through a war.
DESPERATELY SEEKING
The supreme contradictions of Simone Weil.
WILD THING
MJ Lenderman resists the smoothing, neutering effects of technology.
LUCK OF THE DRAW
Nate Silver argues that poker can help us game our uncertain world.
GREEN SLEEVES
“What I want to know,” the woman said to the therapist, “is why the voices always say mean, terrible things.
DRUG OF CHOICE
AI. is transforming the way medicines are made.
EVERY OBITUARY'S FIRST PARAGRAPH
Alfred T. Alfred, whose invention of the plastic fastener that affixes tags to clothing upended the tag industry and made him one of America’s youngest multimillionaires—until he lost his plastic fastener fortune in a 1993 game of badminton, as depicted in the Lifetime original movie “Bad Minton”— died on Saturday. He was eighty-one.
BE HER GUEST
The plush ambience of Ina Garten's good fortune.
SPREADING THE WEALTH
Why a young heiress asked fifty strangers to redistribute her fortune.