"Alien"

If you don’t remember the face of this peerless British player, whose film career spanned from the forties through the eighties, his silky, mellifluous voice will surely be familiar.

As most of you know, I spend my life being picky about movies. There are just a few actors I’ll watch in almost anything. Jean Gabin makes that very short list. Some reading this may have forgotten him, or never even heard of him. His heyday, after all, was nearly eighty years ago, and he’s been gone for over forty. Yet in his prime, no one could touch him.

In this relatively enlightened age, it’s horrifying to consider how gay people were treated by society just half a century ago. Back then, being closeted was not an option but a necessity. As the 1960s dawned, homosexuality was still deemed an illness and a crime across the globe. Those caught and convicted often went to prison, and then were ostracized, their lives ruined.

James Byron Dean, born in Indiana in 1931, was the comet that crashed to earth, throwing it off its rotation when he showed up on America’s movie screens in the mid-1950s. Then, he crashed in a far more earthbound way when, on September 30, 1955, his Porsche collided into another car at a rural California intersection, killing him and the friend traveling with him.

Space certainly gives us humans plenty to think about, and the question of what lies beyond our solar system is still awaiting a full answer. This year, the revived series “Cosmos” had us scratching our heads as we contemplated the abyss, and even with the laws of physics greatly simplified, the universe is still too big for our primitive brains to grasp. Now comes director Christopher Nolan’s thinking person’s space movie “Interstellar,” and with it, a renewed interest in the possibilities of “out there.”