THERE WAS A NEW WIND BLOWING WITH YOUR LAUGHS, JACK

Jack Lemon died today. He was a famous actor of the twentieth century. He was born in 1925. The year I pioneered in 1962 for the Canadian Baha'i community he played in Days of Wine and Roses. He came into prominence during the Ten Year Crusade(1953-63) and was active in the film industry for over half a century in more than one film per year. The persona he developed was of a humorous character usually with some weakness or fault. Like so many of the actors and actresses in the first eighty years of the Formative Age(1921-2001), Jack Lemon served as part of the backdrop, for Baha'is who liked watching films, of the texture of the Formative Age.

Lemon was part of a system that projected a world, through thematic and social conventions, values and institutions, that seemed natural and self-evident. That world habituated its audiences to accept the basic premises of the social order and its ideology. But, beginning in the 1950s/1960s, the social consensus both in society and in film began to 'come apart.'

Jack Lemon and his films were part of this questioning of society's dominant myths and values.1 -Ron Price with thanks to "The Jim Leher Hour," SBS TV, 5-6 pm, 29 June 2001; and 1 M. Ryan and D. Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics of Contemporary Hollywood Film, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1990, p.3.

People began to question,
if they had not already,
the dominant ways of doing things
during those Ten Year Crusade years.
That most wonderful
and thrilling motion
which appeared in the world,
that inception of the Kingdom
of God on earth1
was blowing onto cinema screens
and transforming our world,
little did we know.
Your work, Jack, back then,
back when I had just taken-off
into my pioneering world,
your Days of Wine and Roses,2
was more than part of some
creeping leftism.3
It was part of a permeation
of light to the entire planet.1

1 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.351.
2 Frankly portrayed alcoholism in 1962.
3 one critic's characterization of films in the early to mid-sixties.
Ron Price
29 June 2001
(updated for Channel 4:
28/3/08)