At the beginning of last week's film, Ellen Wagstaff Arden has been lost at sea (missing; presumed dead) while engaged as the photographer for an anthropological expedition to Indo-China. While that back-story was obviously developed to establish the premise of the entire film (that she returns after a long absence to find her husband re-married) it is, I think, very notable that her character is shown to have a successful career . Irrespective of the fact that she is supposed to be married with two young children, the (husband-and-wife) writers of My Favorite Wife saw no conflict in depicting a female character who had a life and a vocation that extended beyond her identity as merely wife and mother. Women in the 1930s were generally seen as people . They were allowed to have ambitions and aspirations that extended beyond "finding a man" and "becoming a mother". It was in the post-war years that mainstream society explicitly attempted to re-define womanhood a
In Bringing Up Baby , Cary Grant became the first person to use the word Gay (in its modern sense) in a Hollywood movie. One might hypothesize that by 1938, the film censors were starting to become more permissive about the subtext that was regularly being slipped into films of the era. One would be completely wrong to thusly hypothesize ( to hypothesize thusly ; excuse me). Film censorship in the late 1930s was just as draconian as ever: a year earlier they had insisted that a shot of a gravestone be cut from a film because the character in question had committed suicide, and it was "inappropriate" to show her receiving a proper burial. The word gay had only slipped through in Bringing Up Baby because no one at the Hays Office knew what it meant in that context. (I won't tell them if you don't.) Cary Grant certainly knew what it meant, and it's very interesting that he was the one who got to introduce the word to American film audiences. Because Cary Grant, th
Movie Nights at the Victoria Park Baptist Church And so life goes on. Some of you may remember that our film series in early 2020 was rudely interrupted by a Global Pandemic. The subsequent year and a half has been, well... You know things are pretty bad when you find yourself wondering if there is a plural for "Apocalypse". But at any rate, here we are ( Apocalypses? Apocali? That's going to bother you now, isn't it?) facing the prospect of attempting to pick up the pieces of Civilisation - assuming of course we don't go into another Lockdown first. ( Apocalyae? Apocalim? ) Movie-going, like so many communal activities, has taken a severe hit during the Pandemic, and I'm willing to hazard a guess that most of the films you have watched over the last eighteen months have been from the comfort of home, with, at most, a family member or two. But watching a film like this: ....isn't really the same as watching a film like this : Sadly we don't quite
We are continuing with the "stage comedy" theme next Thursday, after last week's screening of The Importance of Being Earnest. Noises Off began life as a stage comedy which premiered in London's West End in 1982. It is a farce about a farce, which presumably makes it a meta-farce. This meta-farcical comedy(!) centres around a company of actors rehearsing (and then performing) a play (entitled Nothing On ) which becomes increasingly incoherent as the story progresses. The original stage version is a merciless (and painfully funny) analysis of just how a farce works - or doesn't work, as the case may be. The film adaptation cranks things up a notch by attempting to film the staging of... the staging of a farce (a meta-meta-farce?) and in the process shows just how difficult it can be to translate a stage play to the screen. While the film may not be 100% successful, it does manage to be one of the funniest things you will ever see (the first time I saw it, I la
Last week's film ( It's Always Fair Weather ) was a fun, feel-good MGM Musical that laughed at the rapidly growing power of television (and television advertising in particular) in 1950s American society. Our next film also examines the power of television, but without the "feel-good" part. A Face in the Crowd was released in 1957, but the story it tells is one that feels uncomfortably close to the bone in our present day. It's no coincidence that the film received a widespread re-evaluation in 2016, just as a certain vulgar media personality was gaining devoted populist support in the political arena. Written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan (the pair who had brought you On the Waterfront three years earlier) A Face in the Crowd follows the career of Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, an obnoxious, hillbilly media personality with "man-of-the-people" appeal and a devoted, almost cult-like following (played with frightening power by Andy
Comments
Post a Comment