Directed by William Wyler, The Heiress (1949) tells the story of Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland), the plain and socially awkward daughter of a prominent physician, Dr. Austin Sloper (Ralph Richardson), who makes no secret of his disappointment in her. Catherine is resigned to her ordinary existence until she meets a charming young man named Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift). She is immediately smitten, but her father suspects Morris is a fortune hunter and threatens to disinherit her if she marries him. Undeterred, she makes plans to elope with Morris, though not before telling him about her father’s decision. On the night they are to elope, Catherine waits all night for Morris to come and take her away, but he never arrives.

A few days later, a heartbroken Catherine has a bitter argument with her father, who reveals that he is dying. She tells Dr. Sloper that she still loves Morris and challenges him to change his testament if he is afraid of how she will spend his money after he dies. He does not and dies within days, leaving Catherine his entire estate. Several years later, Morris returns from California, having made nothing of himself. Again, he professes his love for Catherine, claiming that he left her behind because he could not bear to see her destitute. She pretends to forgive him and tells him that she still wants to elope as they originally planned. He promises to come back that night for her, while she tells him that she will start packing her bags. When Morris returns, Catherine takes her revenge. Her widowed aunt, Lavinia Penniman (Mirian Hopkins), asks her how she be so cruel, to what Catherine respondes, “I have been taught by masters.” She calmly orders her maid Maria (Vanessa Brown) to bolt, leaving Morris outside shouting her name. A satisfied Catherine then silently ascends the stairs as Morris desperately bangs at her locked door.

Catherine Sloper: He came back with the same lies, the same silly phrases. He has grown greedier with the years. The first time he only wanted my money; now he wants my love, too. Well, he came to the wrong house — and he came twice. I shall see that he never comes a third time.

The basic storyline of The Heiress originated in Washington Square, a novella written by American-born author Henry James, based on a true story related to him by his close friend, English stage actress Fanny Kemble, concerning her brother’s unsuccessful attempt to marry a rich woman. One of the few Jamesian stories set in his native land, Washington Square was published in 1880, a year before The Portrait of Lady, widely considered by literary experts to be James’s masterpiece. Washington Square was already an American classic when the husband and wife writing team of Ruth and Augustus Goetz adapted it to the stage under the name The Heiress. Produced and directed by Jed Harris, the play opened at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway in September 1947, closing a year later after 410 performances. Wendy Hiller starred as Catherine Sloper, Basil Rathbone as her domineering father and Peter Cookson as her fortune-hunting suitor, Morris Townsend. In 1949, The Heiress was staged in London by John Gieguld, with Peggy Ashcroft and Wendy Hiller alternating in the title role and Ralph Richardson becoming famous as Dr. Sloper.

Meanwhile, Olivia de Havilland had finally reached the point where she was fully in charge of her career, selecting only those roles that she felt would challenge her and enable her to grow as an actress. After suing Warner Bros. to be released from her contract and winning a landmark judgment in December 1944, she resumed her career at Paramount Pictures, winning an Academy Award for Best Actress for her heartfelt performance in Mitchell Leisen’s To Each His Own (1946). When she saw The Heiress on Broadway, she immediately felt that the role of Catherine Sloper would be perfect for her. Upon returning to Los Angeles, de Havilland telephoned director William Wyler and proposed The Heiress as a possible project on which she hoped they could collaborate. Wyler, who was also working at Paramount, was one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood at the time, having helmed such acclaimed pictures as Wuthering Heights (1939), Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

Interested in de Havilland’s proposal, Wyler went to New York to see the play in January 1948 and was instantly fascinated by its subject matter, especially the psychological tensions and the struggle between family members. He immediately contacted the Goetzes’s agent and arranged a meeting with the couple to discuss a screen adaptation of The Heiress. According to Ruth Goetz, Wyler “wanted to know all about James’s original story, and what he changed and what we had supplied. […] By the time we left him that day, we knew he wanted us. I thought he was first-rate.”

A few days later, Paramount offered the Goetzes $250,000 for the screen rights to The Heiress, as well as a salary of $10,000 per week to write the screenplay. Wyler’s only instruction to the couple was that they remove some early lines that made it clear that Morris Townsend was nothing more than a fortune hunter. He wanted the audience to believe — just as Catherine believed — that Morris was honest and straightforward. “When I saw the play in New York, it was so obvious, the way he was leering and estimating the value of everything in Dr. Sloper’s home,” Wyler later recalled. “He was clearly, heavily, and awkwardly established as being there only for the money. I decided I wouldn’t do that. It became an argument, but I still think I was right.”

For the role of Morris Townsend, Wyler initially considered Errol Flynn, who had famously co-starred with de Havilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and eight other pictures for Warner Bros. Because of Flynn’s reputation and persona as a rake, however, Wyler thought he would be too obviously untrustworthy from an early stage and ultimately decided against his casting. Wyler’s next choice was Montgomery Clift, who was then enjoying critical acclaim for his debut film performance in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948) and had just completed Red River (1948) for Howard Hawks. When Augustus Goetz first met Clift on the Paramount set, the actor was wearing a torn jacket, jeans and a T-shirt, part of a bohemian image he was cultivating at the time. “He looked like a bum, and I thought, how could he ever play the suave, elegant Townshend?” Goetz said. But when Clift showed up in full make-up and costume, the writer was astonished: “The transformation was startling. He was the most fashionable youth I ever saw.”

Wyler managed to lure Ralph Richardson to Hollywood to reprise his stage role as Dr. Austin Sloper, Catherine’s emotionally detached father. Wyler had met Richardson a year earlier at Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh’s home, where he had been immediately taken with his sharp wit and eccentricity. He was later delighted to discover that Richardson shared his affection for motorbikes. A veteran of the London stage, Richardson had been acting in films in his native England since 1931. The Heiress marked his American motion picture debut.

To play Catherine’s widowed aunt, Lavinia Penniman, Wyler turned to Miriam Hopkins, with whom he had previously worked in These Three (1936). In the late 1930s, Hopkins had been briefly married to Wyler’s close friend Anatole Litvak, who had just directed de Havilland in The Snake Pit (1948), for which she would receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Wyler and Hopkins would later collaborate in Detective Story (1951) and The Children’s Hour (1961), a remake of These Three.

Filming on The Heiress took place between late June and early September 1948 on a Paramount soundstage, where lavish sets representing New York’s Washington Square in the 1850s had been constructed. Clift was looking forward to working with Wyler, whose earlier pictures Wuthering Heights and The Letter (1940) he had greatly admired. However, he was apprehensive about the director’s reputation as a tyrannical filmmaker who demanded too many takes of his actors. Wyler later remembered that on the first of shooting, “Monty came to me on the set and said quietly, ‘If you ever bawl me out, don’t do it in front of the crew.'” Wyler assured him that he woud not, although he would later be furious about Clift’s insistence on bringing his close friend and acting coach Mira Rostova on the set and his need to consult with her regularly.

Clift and de Havilland did not get along well on the set, barely speaking to each other throughout the entire shoot. De Havilland often complained that she had to deliver her lines in front of an actor who was always looking in the opposite direction — at Rostova and not at her. For his part, Clift, a praticioner of Lee Strasberg’s “method acting,” considered de Havilland an inferior actress and made his feeling known in a letter to his friend, actor Sandy Campbell: “She memorizes her lines at night and comes to work waiting for the director to tell her what to do. You can’t get by with that in the theater; and you don’t have to in the movies. Her performance is being totally shaped by Wyler.” Later, Clift accused Wyler of letting Hopkins steal scenes and upstage him. As for Richardson, Clift felt intimidated by his consummate technique. “Can’t that man make any mistakes?” he groaned after Richardson repeated a take with him for the thirtieth time in the same polished manner, making it hard for Clift to try different things.

Wyler was in awe of Richardson; “You don’t direct an actor like Sir Ralph Richardson,” he later said. The first scene he shot with Richardson required the actor to come in and, silently, hang up his cane and take off his hat, coat and gloves. The scene in question is the moment when Dr. Sloper returns to the house and finds Catherine asleep on the couch, but obviously waiting up for him. “How would like me to play this?” Richardson asked the director. When Wyler wondered if there was more than one way of making an entrance, hang up a cane and take off a hat, coat and gloves, Richardson proceeded to demonstrate half a dozen different demonstrations. “He gave a display, laying out his merchandise,” Wyler recalled. “He entered this set as if he had lived there twenty years. I suspect that all the time he knew which way he wanted to it. That’s an actor for you!”

De Havilland and Wyler worked very well together, clashing only on one scene. When Morris jilts Catherine, she has to climb the stairs to her bedroom carrying the suitcase she had packed for their elopement. De Havilland did numerous takes, but was not able to reach to level of emotion that Wyler was looking for. Finally, she got so frustrated that the usually professional de Havilland threw the suitcase at him. At that point, Wyler realized the problem: there was nothing in the suitcase. He then ordered it filled with heavy props so that de Havilland’s efforts to drag it up the stairs perfectly captured her deep dejection.

Wyler, whose first love had been music, considered the score of fundamental importance to the film and insisted on offering the job to composer Aaron Copland, whose work on Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940) and The North Star (1943) had earned him Oscar nominations. Copland was hired over the objections of Paramount’s head of production Y. Frank Freeman, who was concerned about the composer’s involvment with the pro-Soviet The North Star, which had become the target of congressional investigations. Copland, who had read the novella and seen the play on Broadway, spent the last six weeks of 1948 in Hollywood working on The Heiress, creating five principal themes that “turned out to be, if one of his shorter Hollywood scores, his most complex and subtle one, the one that most resembled his serious concert work.”

The Heiress opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York on October 6, 1949, after Paramount ran a series of high-class advertisements celebrating Wyler and the film. The picture was a solid box-office hit in New York and received excellent reviews from critics. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said that the picture “crackles with allusive life and fire and in its tender and agonized telling of an extraordinary characterful nature,” adding that Wyler “has given this somewhat austere drama an absorbing intimacy and warming illusion of nearness that it did not have on stage.” Crowther also praised de Havilland, noting that “her emotional reactions are more fluent and evident” than those of Wendy Hiller in the original play and that “her portrayal of the poor girl had dignity and strenght.” Outside of New York, however, The Heiress did not do so well, which disappointed Wyler. He told Variety, “I expected it to make a lot of money. It cost too much [the budget was $2.5 million]. It should have been done cheaper. But then it wouldn’t have been the same picture.”

At the 22nd Academy Awards held at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood in March 1950, Olivia de Havilland received from the hands of James Stewart — who almost became her first husband in the early 1940s — her second Oscar for Best Actress. In her acceptance speech, written by her husband, author and screenwriter Marcus Goodrich, de Havilland said, “Your award for To Each His Own I took as an incentive to venture forward. Thank you for this very generous assurance that I have not entirely failed to do so.” Later, she seemed quite subdued when she was interviewed by reporters in the press room: “When I won the first award in 1946, I was terribly thrilled. But this time I felt solemn, very serious and… shocked. Yes, shocked! It’s a great responsibility to win the award twice.” The Heiress also won Oscars for Best Art Direction (Black and White), Best Costume Design (Black and White) and Best Dramatic or Comedy Score, receiving four additional nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Richardson) and Best Cinematography (Black and White).

• 

• 

Time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

When the MSM writes about our 1st amendment these days, they always include weasel-words like “extremists” and put the term free speech in quotation marks as if it’s a theoretical construct of the Nazis or something.

This weekend, as Israel killed 3 children in Gaza because they got too close to a border fence (yes folks, the same kind of border fence Trump wants and the left hates here, they love over there), two events took place that have renewed the artificial debate over whether or not we as a nation can survive the 1st amendment.

In Florida, a mentally disabled man with hair drawn on his balding head with a Sharpie and who lived in a van, was accused of being the Faux Bomber. He was arrested Friday while spinning records at a strip club. He used to be a pizza delivery man before he lost that job. He is estranged from his family and lives in a parking lot in a van decorated with various pro-Trump memes.

Cesar Sayoc Jr. is borderline retarded and has a history of playing fast and loose with the truth. In most civilized nations he would have been under some kind of supervised mental health care but we stopped doing that decades ago under the first incarnation of Trump when Big Business couldn’t find a way to make it profitable enough to privatize.

Sayoc, in spite of a long history of threatening and violent rhetoric displayed on both social media platforms, still had accounts open on both Facebook and Twitter right up until his arrest on Friday.

There was even one woman who had her life threatened directly, a clear violation of Twitter’s community guidelines, and when that woman reported the threat to them, they did nothing and allowed him to continue as usual.

Meanwhile Twitter was busy shutting down the accounts of people and news agencies that simply reported news from across the world… because Twitter didn’t like what they had too say.

Twitter apologized to the woman.

Sayoc’s Facebook account was used in a similar fashion and they only recently shut it down.

The punchline to this cruel joke is this (from the New York Times of course): “And a closer study of his online activity reveals the evolution of a political identity built on a foundation of false news and misinformation, and steeped in the insular culture of the right-wing media”

Yes, it seems adults in America these days can’t be trusted with a free and open internet because… “fake news” makes Fake Bombers.

Robert Bowers was a quiet individual before, as they claim, he walked into the Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday and took 11 lives before giving up and getting himself arrested.

He “hated the Jews” as we are told he told the arresting officers who took him in, alive, after he slaughtered several octogenarians and shot 2 officers multiple times.

Bower supposedly shouted antisemitic slurs at his elderly victims as he attacked them using the standard weapon all of the previous American Gladio attackers used:

 “Bowers used a Colt AR-15 rifle and three Glock .357 handguns during the attack, police said. Bowers legally purchased the three Glock .357s, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation told CNN. It’s not clear whether the AR-15 was purchased legally.” CNN

And, as usual, there was a combat shotgun in the trunk, something else certain agencies wish to have taken out of the public sphere.

Bower was also on Facebook but not much is being made of that. He wasn’t a Trumpite, called him a “globalist not a nationalist” which will go a long way to demonizing the anti-globalization movement.

He (or someone in his name) signed up on Gab back in January right before the Youtube purge and Facebook’s first round of censorship.

Immediately on that platform, he started spouting antisemitic and “conspiracy theory” rhetoric like his paycheck depended on it.

Gab has been building a following as a true free speech outlet, like Facebook and Twitter once were.

So of course, they have been shut down, their hosting sites refusing them service, Stripe and Paypal have pulled Gab account as well.

Gee… that sounds familiar.

 “…the man accused of killing 11 people went to Gab, a two-year-old social network that bills itself as a “free speech” alternative to those platforms, and that has become a haven for white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other extremists. There, he posted a signoff to his followers.

 “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” Mr. Bowers wrote. “Screw your optics, I’m going in.” New York Times

The Times claims Gab to be “the last refuse for scoundrels” in spite of the fact that both Facebook and Twitter keep these individuals on their platforms for just as long as Gab did with just one of them.

That’s because as we slip into a new dark age where we fear each other so much and the MSM cultivate that fear and loathing on a daily basis, we can’t be trusted to speak to one another about anything without some guiding hand overseeing and over-correcting our discourse.

Gab is on the way out because it allows people to spread “fake news” to one another which incites violence, according to our owners.

Meanwhile Chuck Todd makes up ridiculous claims about Russia being behind the “fake news” Fake Bombing campaign and we are told on an hourly basis that Bashar al Assad and Iran created al Qaeda and “ISIS” in preparation for a new war in the Middle East which will kill ten thousand times more folks than Bowers or Sayoc did.

Anyone still remember the mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction?

How about the Gulf of Tonkin?

Fake inflammatory news does not inspire civilians to kill… unless those civilians sign up for the military.

It is amazing how scared Americans have become of the past few decades. Not that long ago, real bombs were going off in this country to the tune of one per day almost, and our citizens did not respond by demanding Big Brother sweep in and gut the constitution.

To be fair, most Americans aren’t calling for that… just the complicit media and the bought-off politicos whom they serve.

The truth of what happened with these two events remains to be unveiled but it is clear how they are being used and what is also clear is the timing of them, right before a critical mid-term election, seems rather suspect.

Talk about your October Surprise.

Shutting down free speech is never an acceptable answer to any problem no matter how scary that speech may be. Scholars and experts have been making that argument since they first started talking about “having the conversation” about “free speech verses safety” back during the Obama days.

Anything this poor writer can add to that debate would seem hollow by comparison except for the fact that I never made a single post about harming anyone, never threatened to kill anyone, never posted a single thing disparaging Muslims or Jews or Christians or any other religion out there…

… and yet all of these things they call for regarding silencing and shutting down and censoring and removing platforms and Stripe accounts and Paypal accounts…

… were already done to me a LOOOOOOONG time ago.

And if you can’t see where this is going… you don’t deserve a constitution anymore.

Time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

How Yukong Moved the Mountains (French: Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes) is a 1976 French documentary film about China directed by Joris Ivens. This film, whose title references the old Chinese story of an old man who moved the mountains (Yugong Yishan), deals with the last days of the Cultural Revolution. At 763 min it is one of the longest films by running time.

Alien III? Didn’t that already happen back in the ’90s? By no less than William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer?

Yes, Alien3 was and still is a thing. Possibly much to the chagrin of many fans of the franchise. But, before that happened, there was an attempt at a script written by William Gibson (father of see above). According to the Alien vs. Predator wiki, Gibson’s script was the first of 10 commissioned sequels to Alien and Aliens and was written in 1987 only to be re-written in 1988 and the studio accepted neither.

Ultimately, the 1988 script is what was uncovered in the last couple of years and came to life as a five-issue comic book arc last year as well as this audio drama.

The first major change that is obvious is that this story does not revolve around Ellen Ripley, the iconic character played by Sigourney Weaver throughout the original run of four movies. Instead, the focal characters are, at least in the beginning, the other three survivors aboard the USS Sulaco with Ripley — Colonial Marine Corporal Dwayne Hicks, the android Bishop, and the little girl Newt whom Ripley saved in Aliens.

When Bishop’s cryo-stasis fails, the upper half of his body (as you recall, he was torn in half by the alien queen at the end of Aliens) becomes aware of, but can do nothing about the fact that the Sulaco has drifted into territory controlled by the Union of Progressive Peoples (UPP). UPP Commandos board the Sulaco and one is immediately attacked by a facehugger that has been surviving inside Bishop’s severed torso. Once the attack is over, the UPP, assuming this to be some sort of biological attack on themselves by the Marines, recovers Bishop’s torso for a data dump, but sends the Sulaco and the remaining three residents on their way.

The Sulaco soon docks with the space station Anchorpoint where another attack occurs. Ripley’s cryotube is damaged resulting in her going into a deep coma (hence her lack of facetime in this drama), but both Hicks and Newt are awakened and otherwise unharmed. The remainder of the story focuses on the spread of alien matter throughout Anchorpoint and its disastrous results.

While I missed Ripley, I have to admit that having a story centered on Hicks and Bishop was pretty cool. They were, admittedly, two of my favorite characters from Aliens and I always wanted a more appropriate conclusion to their stories than what happened in Alien3. What made this audiobook even sweeter was that Audible managed to sign both Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen to voice their respective big-screen characters in the drama. I loved that!

Unfortunately, despite having Biehn and Henriksen back in the saddle, Gibson’s Alien III script only rates as “interesting.” As a standalone space drama, it’s decent and worth a listen if you can separate it out from its predecessors. It has an intriguing new twist to the alien mythos, one that will easily tear the Alien fandom into either love-it or hate-it factions (based on the mixed reviews on Audible.com, it already has). But the drama itself was lacking the sense of impending doom of previous movies and I really didn’t latch onto any of the new characters like I have in just about every movie released under the Alien banner. Perhaps subsequent listens will fare better. Clocking in at 2:16, it would be pretty easy to give it another shot.

On October 20, 2011, Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a mob of NATO-backed ‘rebels’, after first being beaten and violated in the most barbaric fashion. History leaves no doubt that not only was the Libyan leader murdered on this day but Libya itself.

The regime-change crew who dominate Western governments have a long indictment sheet against their names. Since 9/11 they have wrought havoc and human misery on a grand scale in their determination to reshape and own a world that has never been theirs to own. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – Syria currently embroiled in a pitiless conflict for its survival as a secular, non-sectarian state – this is the miserable legacy of nations which speak the language of democracy while practising the politics of domination.

Of the aforementioned victims of Western imperialism, there is a strong argument to be made that Libya’s destruction constitutes an especially grievous crime. After all, in 2010, the year before it experienced its ‘revolution’, the United Nations Development Programme considered Libya a high development country in the Middle East and North Africa. In concrete terms this status translated to a literacy rate of 88.4%, a life expectancy of 74.5 years, gender equality, and various other positive indicators. In addition, Libya enjoyed 4.2% economic growth in 2010 and could boast of foreign assets in excess of $150 billion.

Compare this record to Libya in 2016. According to testimony provided by US Army General David Rodriguez to the US Senate Armed Services Committee in March, it is a failed state, with the general estimating it would take ‘“10 years or so” to achieve long-term stability in what is a “fractured society”’.

There is currently no single government or authority in Libya whose writ runs in the entire country. Instead three competing authorities control their own fiefdoms. The internationally recognized government is the Government of National Accord (GNC), led by Fayez al-Sarraj, is based in the capital, Tripoli. There is also the Government of National Salvation, led by Khalifa Ghwell, which is also based in Tripoli. The third centre of power, meanwhile, is located in Tobruk in the east of the country. It is headed by an anti-Islamist general, Khalifa Haftar, who leads the Libyan National Army (LNA). Economically, oil revenues, responsible for 90% of revenue under Gaddafi, have halved, violence is widespread, and since 2011 Daesh has managed to gain a foothold, though in recent months the terrorist organization has come under huge pressure in its stronghold of Sirte from forces representing the GNC.

The impact of the chaos that has engulfed the country since Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered can be measured by the flood of Libyans who have attempted the perilous journey across the Mediterranean with the objective of reaching Europe. In the process untold thousands have perished.

UN Security Council Resolution 1973, passed in March 2011, marked the end of the Arab Spring and the beginning of the Arab Winter. The mass and popular demonstrations that succeeded in toppling Tunisian dictator Ben Ali and is Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak were not replicated in Libya. Instead, in Benghazi, where the anti-Gaddafi movement was centred, Islamists predominated. There was no nationwide mass movement in Libya, such as those that swept across Tunisia and Egypt, and no popular support for toppling a government and leader who presided over a society that enjoyed the highest standard of living of any in Africa.

Loyalist Gaddafi forces were defeated by NATO not the opposition forces emanating from Benghazi. Indeed it was at the point at which the country’s armed forces were approaching Benghazi, preparatory to crushing the uprising, when NATO intervened – based on the lie of protecting civilians when in truth it was intent on regime change.

Gaddafi’s crime in the eyes of the West was not that he was an authoritarian dictator – how could it be when their closet ally in the region is Saudi Arabia? His crime in their eyes, it was revealed in a tranche of classified Clinton emails, released by Wikileaks in January of this year, was his intention of establishing a gold-backed currency to compete with the euro and the dollar as an international reserve currency in Africa. In this regard the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and then US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, were key actors in pushing for NATO intervention. Libyan oil was also a factor.

The classified emails prove beyond any doubt that what took place in Libya was a monstrous crime for which those responsible have yet to be held accountable. On the contrary, Sarkozy is currently in the process of preparing a political return as French president, while Hillary Clinton is favorite to win the race for the White House against Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Of the two, it is Clinton who was filmed clapping her hands and laughing at the news of Muammar Gaddafi’s murder in 2011. It is Clinton who pressed for the military intervention that ended in Libya’s destruction. And it is Hillary Clinton who has the gall to present herself as a moral giant in comparison to her rival for the US presidency.

The Libyan people may well disagree.

The first Buddhist cave monuments at Ajanta date from the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. During the Gupta period (5th and 6th centuries A.D.), many more richly decorated caves were added to the original group. The paintings and sculptures of Ajanta, considered masterpieces of Buddhist religious art, have had a considerable artistic influence.