World View: ‘Mille mercis!’
Life has a way of coming around full circle.
Switching on the car radio as I drove in the St. Patrick’s Day rain, I overheard an NPR report about a newly restored “Napoleon,” the 1927 silent film masterpiece by French filmmaker Abel Gance, which was coming to a screen in the Bay Area.
When the reporter noted that Francis Ford Coppola presented his own restored version of this cinematic epic in 1981, and how, at the end of the screening, Coppola telephoned the nonagenarian Gance in Paris to converse with him from the stage, I recalled a memory frozen deep in my past.
My late mother and father were in the audience that day at Radio City Music Hall.
France has been on my mind lately. As I listened to the reporter wrapping up, it struck me that I had South Coast Repertory veteran actor Hal Landon Jr. to thank for unwittingly triggering a chain of recent events connected to my mother’s homeland.









