Ordinary Ladies

 It gives me great pleasure to announce a brand new series of films at the Victoria Park Baptist Church, beginning on Thursday, the 9th of June.

Ordinary Ladies

In 1989, Lindsay Crouse appeared in an episode of Columbo in which she plays a psychologist who murders her business partner/boyfriend after she discovers that he has been cheating on her.

Being a well-respected sex therapist, she devises what she thinks will be the perfect murder. She arranges to meet her partner at a very public but slightly sleazy bar, and dresses up as a high-end call girl. He thinks that they are playing a wonderful new sex game, but of course she is performing for potential witnesses, who will testify that he hired the services of a prostitute who obviously killed him when things went sour.


Meanwhile, she sets herself up with an alibi by appearing at a high-profile fund raiser before ducking into the bathroom and changing into her "call girl" persona. Thus bedecked, she walks right past her friends and co-workers who take notice of this very exotic and desirable woman, but completely fail to see that it is her.


Later, Lieutenant Columbo hears from a witness who saw her returning and followed her to the ladies' room, hoping to pick up this very desirable and enticing beauty. Of course the "beauty" never comes out of the ladies' room, and he waits there in vain; even when Lindsay Crouse (back in her own clothes) walks right past him.

"So no one came out of the bathroom?" asks Columbo.

"Ladies went in and ladies came out," he replies.

Columbo is sceptical.

"Just ordinary ladies?" 

"Ordinary ladies!"

***

Our new film series is going to be a celebration of "Ordinary Ladies". These are not super-heroines; they are not vamps or femmes-fatale - they are, in Columbo's words, the ordinary ladies who are usually on the sidelines of most film plots. 


Cinema is filled with ordinary men who are thrust by circumstances into extraordinary situations (think of Cary Grant in North by Northwest) but far fewer films tell stories like this with women.


Which brings us, of course, to the first film in our series.


The Reckless Moment was released in 1949 and tells the story of a completely ordinary housewife (Joan Bennett) who finds her day-to-day life coming apart at the seams when her teenaged daughter's dead-beat boyfriend is apparently murdered. James Mason (in one of his first Hollywood roles) approaches her, thinking she will be an easy mark for blackmail, only to find that she is not remotely what he thought she would be.

Directed by Max Ophüls, The Reckless Moment is a Hollywood film like no other. Joan Bennet's housewife is neither naïve nor super-human; she is exactly what she appears to be, and therein lies her strength. James Mason may be a hardened gambler and criminal but he has never tried to deal with anyone like her and, bluntly, doesn't stand a chance. 


We will be screening The Reckless Moment at 7.30pm on Thursday the 9th of June at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. I hope to see you there!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Wife in Every Room

Image
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
Read more
Image
  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
Read more

Down With... Architecture!??

Image
  Okay, folks, this one is just plain bonkers. We've had a month or so of fairly heavy films that tackle some difficult topics (Evolution; Witch-burning; Segregation; Rape.. nice, uncontentious subjects) so it's about time we pause for some refreshment. The rest of March is going to be fun, fun, fun. Say hello to Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was born in Russia to a well-educated, upper-middle class Jewish family. The October Revolution of 1917 brought her comfortable childhood to a very sudden and violent end (she was twelve at the time) and her family lost absolutely everything. By the time she was able to travel to the United States in 1926, she had cultivated what was to become a life-long visceral hatred for Communism, or indeed for any remotely collectivist philosophy. She wasn't merely opposed to the Soviet Union (which you can sort of understand, given what happened to her family); she was violently opposed to any obligations that might be imposed upon the individual for the b
Read more

We re-visit stage comedy (in more ways than one) on Thursday the 7th of October

Image
 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
Read more

Down With... Heresy

Image
  Okay, folks, this really is it. The time has come. The moment is now.  We have been running these film nights for over eight years, and in that time, it's safe to say that I have shown many different kinds of films. Some have been iconic classics, and some have been incredibly obscure. Some of them were silent films. A few were in 3D. In fact, we've shown pretty much every type of film by now: old films, new films and films from in between. French films, German films, even films for Halloween. In all these years, however, there is something that I have consistently resisted, but have always wanted to show. I have just been waiting for the right moment. This is the moment. The moment we've been waiting for. (...and if you get the reference, you will know what I'm about to say.) That's right, ladies and gents. On Thursday, the 30th of March, and for the very first time, I'm going to show an opera. Down With... Lady Parts So far, in our exploration of Cancel Cult
Read more