Leodard's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by

Taking advantage of my mother’s home video library on a visit home for the hoildays, I decided to treat myself to an old fashioned movie marathon. I decided on a double feature with cartoon and film short to start (sans Pathé news)…

Movie Marathon Entry the Fourth:

The light tone of this classic adaptation puts it page and cover in my book above more recent sentimental adaptations aimed at a certain audience. The dialogue is crisp and bright and just witty enough, on target, as it were. Laurence Olivier shines as always, this time as the inimitable Darcy.

Fleisher's GULLIVER'S TRAVELS by Swift

Taking advantage of my mother’s home video library on a visit home for the hoildays, I decided to treat myself to an old fashioned movie marathon. I decided on a double feature with cartoon and film short to start (sans Pathé news)…

Movie Marathon Entry the First:

Perhaps Disney is to blame for the fact that so many people consider Swift some sort of quaint caricaturist, when in fact he is one of the more biting, bitter misanthropes to ever write.

This is probably the world’s second cartoon feature film (after Snow White) but all the saccharine elements are already in place, the star-crossed princess, the love birds singing. The biggest loss is of course the picaresque since Gulliver drops in like God to solve all the Lilliputian problems. All the while we keep waiting and hoping he’ll move on.

Lewin's PORTAIT OF DORIAN GRAY by Wilde

"Always is a dreadful word." This film is dominated by a devil's advocate. One begins to believe Oscar actually likes principles better than persons, and persons without principle best of all. In one short speech he fausts Dorian with any number of cynical aphorisms: "There's no such thing as a good influence; all influence is immoral. The purpose of life is self-development."

"We suffer for what the gods give us...youth is the one thing worth having. What the gods give they quickly take away. The gods are jealous of you... "The world is yours for a season; it would be tragic if you realized too late..every impule that we resist broods in the mind...Caprice lasts a little longer than life-long pasion."

When we remember the attitude his society had towards Oscar's 'nature', one can begin understand his cynicism in declaing that "being natural is simply a pose." He held out some hope for redemption through aesthetics. "There's nothing that can cuer the sould but the senses." And vice versa.

Arau's LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE by Laura Esquivel

I am not sure this film will become a classic any more than Chocolat or Babett's Feast, but it makes me hungry for more. Such sensual novels are almost as easy to adapt as action thrillers. Still, Arau makes a wise choice to emply some first-person narration voice-over. For one, the protagonist (and what sweet agony!) can comment on the action, noting her black-hole heart the night her mother proises her intended to her sister in marriage, and note the passage of time efficiently. She knits all night.

This is a fim about sublimation. Would that we all remained celibate if we could produce such poetic prose, such imagery and cookery. There is not much in the way of analysis of the many cause of revolution - national and familial. There is just pomegranet seeds, candles, a nude on horseback...

There is an American butting in, of course, but the mother plays the fairy tale villain, not allowed to defend tradition, but cold and calm in her crulty, much worse in its way than an angry tyrany would be.

Deborah Warner's LAST SEPTEMBER by Elizabth Bowen

From the opening phonograph scene, we know we are in the 20's. Instead of fiddling while Rome burns, we have dancing while Ireland broods. The film effectively brings out the class elements to the conflict - albeit in a less masculine way thatn How Green Was My Valley. "About what?" an Anglo-Irish asks at cadlelit dinner, when asked what he thinks about 'the situation'.

"Closing in, I think. Rolling up." The problem of this film is depicting those caught between, while failing to find a tone that is close while the main characters are 'rolling '. Cheerio and all that! What are they doing having a tennis party in the midst of war? (And why are we with them?) One stiff upper lip desires sometihng real to happen, even the house to burn.

Keira Knightly feels sure 'they' (the rebels) won't shoot her chap while she's there. "They all know me." One struggles to know the characters in the film. Such things are more easily done with novelistic interiority.
Nothing against Keira Knightly, but I am in love with Maggie Smith. See her shine also in Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jane Brodie.

Ptushko's SADKO by the Soviets

Sadko goes in search of the bird of happiness. In India he finds a phoenix whose lady's head sings warriors to sleep, but it is a sad sleep. How Sadko sails to India, fighting Vikings along the way, and back via Egypt is only one of the mysteries. Answers hardly matter amidst such lushery.

Soviet touches are not subtle but less kodachrome than the fairy dust. Sadko appeals directly to the people when the merchants refuse to bankroll his quest. But it is the sea princess who comes up with the golden fish. A less-than-subtle jibe at monarchy has sea king and queen argue over whether Sadko plays the zither or the psalter. She wins.

What did the terrestial princess give Sadko to carry around his neck? For that you must see the film, but I will let slip that he find happiness - not in India, nor in Norseland, nor in Egypt, but in the native soil.

Kakogiannis's ELECTRA by Euripides

She cuts her hair in grief and looks like a boy. Her lost twin brother can be recognized by a hunting scar. But this is not Shakespeare yet. Our film can draw from classical sources galore. Early emphasis on Electra's marriage follows Euripides, whereas Sophocles picks up with Orestes return. Aeschylus relies on Orestes footprint on the tomb.

Electra says Orestes will reverse their bad fortune. Aegisthus says he will remove Orestes' head. Kakogiannis portrays these graphically with Electra rolling on the tomb, a point of view shot completing a 360 degree rotation off the axis of the horizon live.

Of course it began farther back. A god makes a command. Agamemmnon killed daughter Iphigenia, whose mom Clytemnestra, his wife, kills him in the bath. So their son Orestes kills her. The furies pursue him. We're back to gods, or Sartre's flies.