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For a movie that is so scrupulously accurate in so many respects, "Walk the Line" makes surprisingly little of the abiding faith that Mr. Cash always credited, along with Ms. Carter, for saving his life. "That dimension of Cash's life, which was present all the way through, was absent," said the Rev. C. Clifton Black, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, who criticized the film for that reason in a review for the magazine The Christian Century. "I was stunned."

WHEN the new movie Walk the Line about the life of Johnny Cash opens in London next week, cinema-goers will be treated to a selection of his songs in London Underground stations. Buskers are being hired for £40 a day to sing Cash’s hits as part of a marketing ploy to sell CDs. Record companies have discovered that one of the best ways to promote a new release is to pay buskers to sing its songs to some of the 3m people who use the Tube each day. The stunt will surprise many travellers who believe buskers are enterprising musicians...

The acclaim surrounding Johnny Cash and the recent hit biopic about him—Walk the Line, whose two leads, Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as his wife June Carter, are up for Golden Globe awards Monday night in Beverly Hills—raises a question. Why has Cash stood out for Hollywood from the ranks of country singers, most of whom mainstream popular culture dismisses and parodies as musically unsophisticated rednecks? Granted, Cash’s life story is filled with film-worthy drama: the Arkansas cotton farmer’s son who becomes a star, records with Elvis, but must overcome drug addiction, a marital break-up, and a series...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. Kathy Cash, one of Johnny Cash's five children, was so upset about how her mother is portrayed in the upcoming movie "Walk the Line" that she walked out of a family-only screening _ five times. She thinks the movie, which opens nationwide Nov. 18, is good and that performances by Joaquin Phoenix as her dad and Reese Witherspoon as her stepmother, June Carter Cash, are Oscar-worthy. But she also said the film unfairly shows her mother, Vivian Liberto Distin, Johnny Cash's first wife, as a shrew. Actress Ginnifer Goodwin plays her in the movie. "My mom was basically...

There was an empty seat at this year’s MTV Music Video Awards. The late Johnny Cash wasn’t there. It’s not as though Cash frequented the Generation X/Y annual awards program. He was old enough to be the grandfather of the most seasoned performer on the platform. Still, two years ago, even while he was sick in a hospital, the Man in Black was there. At the 2003 awards show, Cash’s video “Hurt” was nominated for an award—up against shallow bubblegum pop acts such as that of Justin Timberlake. Cash didn’t win. But the showing of the video caused an almost...

I was 19 when I fully understood that historians often can’t grasp the complexities of the characters they purport to speak of. It's something I learned once in a history class, when a professor suggested that George Washington was less than devout and merely used civil religion to unify the nation. When I raised my hand to question this, I was told to bring in evidence to the contrary--which I did the next day, reading aloud from Washington's diary, in which he expressed his deep religious faith in the manner less of a president and more of an 18th-century revival...

Walk the Line Ignores Cash's Christianity by Jack Langer Posted Nov 21, 2005 Just as I began contemplating walking out of the new Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line—it was when Cash is in the throes of a drug addiction withdrawal scene ripped off from the movie Ray—I turned my head and saw the middle-aged woman next to me dabbing her tears with a handkerchief. I found the display deeply surprising and somehow unsettling; I’ve been more emotionally affected by Kenny’s death in most episodes of South Park than I was by any scene in this movie. But my weepy...

As most people know by now, the biopic of Johnny Cash, Walk the Line, is set to hit theaters on November 18 and is then set to reap a range of Oscar nominations. And as most people also know, it is a film about a rebel and legend, about a Man in Black who nearly kills himself before turning to the light. But while a movie about a musician battling addictions and the demons of his past is not unusual, a movie about a musician sharing a faithful, lasting love for 35 years is. Before their deaths in 2003, Johnny...