strange and random happenstance

There are some miniseries that aired on Masterpiece that have never been on DVD or streaming stateside and this royally pisses me off. There are so many great shows that once you see them all you're left with is your memory. And I know, I know, this is how things used to be. You'd see a movie in the theatre or watch a show and until the advent of home recording devices in the eighties this was just how you lived, off your memories. The two shows I most wish to see again are oddly both based on Kingsley Amis novels, Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You. Take a Girl Like You aired during a headlong rush of chaos in my life that resulted in me eventually take some time off from school. This is a roundabout way of saying I caught a little bit of it when it first aired, really liked what I saw, but was unable to watch the whole thing until it aired again a few years later. But at least that time I was prepared with a shiny new VHS tape to record it on! I really should bust out those tapes. I think I even have the Colin Firth miniseries of Nostromo... And yes, I'm weird in that I have a VHS actually hooked up to a TV so watching it wouldn't be a problem... Now this is all I'm going to be thinking about for days! Oh, I think I have Lucky Jim too! The real reason Take a Girl Like You appealed to me was the period setting and Emma Chambers was in it. Emma Chambers, who is sadly no longer with us, is an international treasure for her portrayal of Alice Tinker on The Vicar of Dibley. Emma only had twelve credits to her name, but the effervescent if slightly dim Alice and her lovely turn as Hugh Grant's sister in Notting Hill made her an actress never to be forgotten. Of course these were very up characters, very verging on hyper, so the depressing drunk who is more than a little bit of a Nosey Parker she plays in Take a Girl Like You is a surprising and delightful change. My mom and dad would say a depressing change, but I liked seeing her range. I also happened to notice that Rupert Graves was in this, but this was still during the time I hadn't warmed up to him. It was the one two punch of V for Vendetta and Sherlock that did that for me. But anyway, once I saw the whole thing, Take a Girl Like You is an interesting look at a very specific time in England and the sexual politics of dating. I just wish I didn't feel like it dated me to say how much I liked it when it aired over a decade ago!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Alice Tinker, Colin Firth, DVD, Emma Chambers, Fifty Years a Masterpiece, Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, Masterpiece, Nostromo, Notting Hill, Rupert Graves, Sherlock, Take a Girl Like You, The Vicar of Dibley, VHS

The original adaptation of The Forsyte Saga is what birthed Masterpiece Theatre. Without that series we wouldn't be celebrating fifty years of British television right now. Though aside from Michael York and Susan Hampshire the original series lacks name recognition. That's where this version really knocked it out of the park; Damian Lewis, Gina McKee, Rupert Graves, Ioan Gruffudd, Corin Redgrave, Barbara Flynn, Amanda Root, and Ben Miles! You have freakin' Horatio Hornblower in it! Plus so many up and coming actors like Julian Ovenden who should have SO married Sam on Foyle's War. I mean seriously, her husband is a loser and she deserved to officially be Foyle's daughter! I will forever be pissed by this until Anthony Horowitz rewrites the last few seasons. He can take time out from being a big time author to do this! He can multitask I'm sure of it. This miniseries set up to be lush while the original was the last series to be fully filmed in black and white. It's like they had something to prove and prove it they did. One of my favorite touches is the dress that Irene Forsyte is wearing on the cover of the DVD set (see above.) This dress is an exact replica of the dress from John Singer Sargent's painting Madame X, except in red. Little touches like this are seen throughout the series. Especially in the house Robin Hill. A fictional house my dad loves so much he's willing to move into it immediately. But what this series is most known for is how gut-wrenching it is. You will be non-stop crying through the entire series. Therefore it takes fortitude to watch it. Being prepared doesn't help. But I think this emotional release is why I love it so much, and in particular the second series. When Young Jolyon Forsyte played by Rupert Graves lies dying and his daughter June played by Gillian Kearney is copiously weeping that she cannot live without him, I felt it so deep in my bones that I think I might have had a little nervous breakdown that only giving my dad a big hug could fix. That night I couldn't stop crying this series forever took up a little corner of my soul and I wouldn't change it for the world. 

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Anthony Horowitz, Barbara Flynn, Corin Redgrave, Damian Lewis, Daughters, Fathers, Fifty Years a Masterpiece, Foyle's War, Ioan Gruffudd, John Singer Sargent, Madame X, Robin Hill, Rupert Graves, The Forsyte Saga

Mrs. Dalloway
Based on the book by Virginia Woolf
Starring: Rupert Graves, Vanessa Redgrave, Amanda Drew, Oliver Ford Davies, Natascha McElhone, Alan Cox, Hal Cruttenden, Lena Headey, Amelia Bullmore, Rupert Baker, Alistair Petrie, John Franklyn-Robbins, Phyllis Calvert, Katie Carr, Selina Cadell, Michael Kitchen, Robert Portal, John Standing, Margaret Tyzack, Robert Hardy, Denis Lill, Kate Binchy, Sarah Badel, Janet Henfrey, Faith Brook, Tony Steedman, and Christopher Staines
Release Date: September 4th, 1997
Rating: ★★★
To Watch

It is a beautiful summer's day in June. Mrs. Dalloway wonders aloud how is she so lucky to have her party on such a perfect day. When she was young, at Bourton, every day was perfect and spent with her friends, several of whom are coming to her party that night. As she walks to the florist she runs into one of them, Hugh, a rather hopeless case then and now. But he has his purpose. After picking out the sweet peas at the shop, just like her dear friend Sally Seton used to decorate the table one night all those years ago, a car backfires and she sees a young man in distress through the shop window. Septimus Warren Smith is out with his wife Rezia. They are due for an appointment later at the doctors because Septimus keeps threatening to kill himself and sees his dead friend Evans wherever he goes. The image of that young man will stick with Clarissa all day as she prepares for her party. And she has some unexpected hurdles; her daughter, Elizabeth, is insisting she won't attend because she'll be helping her friend Miss Kilman in her charitable work. There is also a little do-to about a boring acquaintance wishing to attend whom Clarissa would rather not. But the biggest surprise is when Peter Walsh walks through the door. Peter has been in India ever since Clarissa threw him over for her husband all those summers ago at Bourton. Peter's life, and in particular his love life, is a shambles and he breaks down in front of Clarissa. He can't help be overwhelmed by what his life has become and the thought that he loved Clarissa. He's uncertain if he still does, but the fact that he did has colored his entire life. Despite saying that under no circumstance would he be invited to the party he gets an invitation shouted after him as he flees the Dalloway's residence. Then finally, the hour has come, the party is to start, and Clarissa is sure it will be a failure. She just wishes to create this one perfect evening for her guests so that they can go out into the world afterwards and look back on the wonder of the perfect memory, the perfect evening, the perfect conversation, the perfect party. She worries that one of her guests, a rather renowned doctor, will ruin everything by discussing the suicide of his patient Septimus Warren Smith, by bringing death into her domain, but sometimes life, love, and memories, are greater than death, which has it's own kind of freedom.   

Remember the days when you'd just channel surf and see what was on because the only other way was to drag out the TV Guide, an actual, physical, small newsprint block of information, not that glossy mag that's still around today, and try to figure out which channel was which because each cable company had a different channel lineup? Well, back then I stumbled on this wonderfully British and evocative movie. I only got to watch about twenty minutes of it because dinner was ready but it left enough of an impression that I bothered to dig out the TV Guide after the fact and figure out that it was called Mrs. Dalloway. Knowing it was based on the book by Virginia Woolf, and at this time I would never watch an adaptation without reading the book first, I went out and got myself a copy of Mrs. Dalloway and it sat on my shelves for years. Then after The Hours came out a new edition of Mrs. Dalloway was released including the short story which was the initial inspiration for the book so I thought to myself, lucky I didn't read Mrs. Dalloway without reading it's precursor first! So the first copy sat around for five years and the second copy sat around for, I'm almost ashamed to say it, seventeen years, until it was finally dug out and read this year. Here's the thing, the book is a lot of work to read whereas this is an easy adaptation that you don't have to work for. Which means it's probably the exact opposite of what Virginia Woolf would have wanted but makes for a pleasurable moviegoing experience. Eileen Atkins, yes, that Eileen Atkins, the Dame, has taken Mrs. Dalloway and made it into a rather sweet coming of age story combined with the wistfulness of aging and first and lasting loves with an edge of social satire that has everything to do with the casting and nothing to do with the source material. In fact, the closer it gets to the source material, especially with regard to Septimus, played by Rupert Graves, and his PTSD, the less the movie works. This movie falls squarely into the time period of Rupert Graves's acting that I hate. He took himself so seriously and overacted so abysmally that I don't know how anyone can watch him in anything he was in from the start of his career to about 2005. In fact it wasn't until Sherlock in 2010 where I started to like him after the loathing and indifference. So if you can stomach some truly bad acting on his part and want a nice summery escape to an England that exists only in dreams of the past this idyll is for you.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Adaptation, British, Dames, Eileen Atkins, Michael Kitchen, Mrs. Dalloway, Party, PTSD, Roaring Back to Reading, Robert Hardy, Rupert Graves, Septimus, Sherlock, Suicide, The Hours, Vanessa Redgrave, Virgina Woolf

His Last Bow by Arthur Conan Doyle
Published by: Book-of-the-Month Club
Publication Date: 1917
Format: Hardcover, 308 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

While England may be the home of Sherlock Holmes, that doesn't in any way limit where the criminals come from. They seep out of the woodwork from Italy to South America. Homegrown or exotic, Holmes is on the case. From the insight that "The Upright Englishman" makes the perfect alibi to what exactly a missing train ticket means on a dead man, Holmes can recreate the largest of crimes from the smallest of evidence. Money, revenge, and love, they are always at the heart of the criminal. But Holmes himself isn't adverse to a little revenge, staging a touching deathbed scene with himself as star all in order to catch just one more criminal who would have gotten away. Sure it might be callous to trick Mrs. Hudson and Watson into thinking he's dying, but he'll be alive to apologize after he gets his man. Yet it is the illusive killing agents that are the most fascinating. The poison that is so rare that it incriminates versus exonerates the criminal. With all this fascinating criminality one wonders why Holmes would ever retire... but even in retirement he is ready to help his homeland when they need him the most as a wind from the east rises and the eve of the great war approaches. Sherlock Holmes will always be there, wherever he is needed most. Even if that means he's with his bees.

With His Last Bow you can see that Conan Doyle is trying to find a new way to invigorate his waning interest in Sherlock Holmes. Despite my dislike of The Valley of Fear there was no doubt that Conan Doyle enjoyed writing in a longer format with a very different subject matter. While sadly Conan Doyle couldn't omit Sherlock Holmes from the Sherlock Holmes stories, he could at least switch it up. Each collection of Sherlock Holmes stories contains about twelve plus adventures. While His Last Bow is the same length page wise as all other collections it contains a reduced number of tales. The reason for this is that he has lengthened his stories. Therefore the tales told here are not a quick short story, nor a full out book, yes, we're in novella territory, and I think perhaps this is where Conan Doyle should have always been. He sometimes struggles to maintain his stories for an entire book, hence the long jaunts to America, while his short stories are sometimes so brief that there isn't time to do the mystery justice. This is a happy combination of the two with Conan Doyle being able to bring in tropes he likes from his books, like breaking up the stories into acts, so that we get different scenes and the story isn't confined as much as previously. Holmes is able to delve deeper into the mysteries without having to have the story padded out or made spare. So while there is the occasional story that fails due to subject matter, the ones that work are all the better for this deeper investigation from the world's greatest consulting detective.

Yet there is one incidence in this book where Conan Doyle takes his desire to switch up his writing style in such a wrong direction that the story itself is almost painful to read. The titular "His Last Bow" eschews the narrative style of Watson we have grown accustomed to and instead opts for a third person narration style. While this in itself could have conceivably worked, given a good story, instead we are stuck listening to German braggarts with Holmes being nothing more than a deus ex machina once again. Seriously, what was the point of this story? It just doesn't work in the context of the greater canon. There is some speculation that it was written for patriotic propaganda for WWI, but even if that's true could it at least have been well written? Plus Holmes is working against himself. He's fed the Germans all this false information and then tells them it's false. Why? Why not let them believe it's true, it would be far better spycraft! Also, the two years with Holmes working undercover for this one moment, it seems like too much work for too little gain. I keep trying to think if the story would have worked written in the conventional first person narration, but yet again I hit too many stumbling blocks that are all tied up with the flaws of the plot. If Conan Doyle wanted to tell this story in a unique manner, and seeing as Watson is out of the picture for so long, why not for the first time in what is canonically the last story have Holmes have his say? That might have worked... it at least would have been different but similar enough to not stick out like the sore thumb that it is.

With fifty-six short stories in all one can start to wonder how it is that Conan Doyle was able to maintain a freshness to each individual adventure. The truth is that he sometimes didn't and in fact repeated himself, like how "The Red-Headed League" and "The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk" are basically one and the same with different coverings. But I never thought that he'd repeat himself so completely. "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" is a tale that was viewed as rather too gruesome for his reader's sensibilities, being omitted from the British edition of Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and quickly being removed from the American edition because of our delicate feelings, rather ironic when you think how Conan Doyle depicted us Americans. In later British editions of Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes it was put in and for us Americans it was included in this book. But one thing is very clear when you start to read this story, and that's Conan Doyle never expected it to make a comeback once his publishers had pulled it. Why do I know this? Because of "The Adventure of the Resident Patient." When I started reading "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" I had a weird sense of déjà vu. At first I was all, hmm, this seems rather familiar. Soon I realized it was word for word the same as another Sherlock story I read. Then I started to wonder if perhaps it was the same story just re-published. But no... it had a different title and a far different crime. So to the Internet I went. When the "gruesome" story was pulled Conan Doyle hacked it up and took the entire beginning about Poe and Henry Ward Beecher and made it the beginning of a new story he was writing, "The Adventure of the Resident Patient." So yes, he was basically plagiarizing himself and confusing his fans. Shame on you Conan Doyle for your laziness...

I find it ironic that "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" was removed for it's controversial and grotesque subject matter when His Last Bow has Holmes again and again referring to his specialized work as being crimes of the grotesque. I think this is one of the incidents in which something is lost in translation over time as the English language evolves. Because grotesque to me obviously doesn't mean the same thing as it does to Holmes and therefore Conan Doyle. I have visions of Gothic horrors, abominations, nightmarish visions, whereas he probably means odd, unnatural, and bizarre. But even more ironically, I would still call the crime in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" grotesque, because that is what getting ears in the mail is... an abomination that only those of a truly perverse mindset would set out to do. So how do we take this definition shift in stride? Because if we are to take it more as it is seen today, it adds another, darker level to Holmes. Perhaps this is why there is so much fan fiction wherein Holmes is involved in the solving of the Jack the Ripper murders. Because these murders would fit both definitions of the word, past and present. A combination of old sensibilities with new. Either way you look at it this throw away line from Holmes in two or three stories really makes you think on what he does and how this effects his standing in society. He is a man apart. But not so apart that he is at the Phantom of the Opera stage that grotesque would imply... but still, it makes you think.

But what I have been thinking most of in reading all these tales is why is Lestrade the only policeman most people associate with Sherlock Holmes? Fifty-six short stories and four books and he only appears thirteen times! So he's only in about 20% of the stories! I mean, yes, he appears more then any other law enforcement officer, but he doesn't make the biggest impression. Inspector Hopkins is far more memorable due to his missteps as well as the random praise and hopes Holmes sometimes heaps on him in his four appearances. Throughout the complete canon there are 35 detectives, 16 agents, and 14 constables, 8 of which appear in multiple stories, and yet it's always Lestrade. Have we just decided to forget all the rest along the way? In fact this problem has become so ubiquitous that when Paul Chequer played DI Dimmock on the Sherlock season one episode "The Blind Banker" everyone was wondering where Rupert Graves as Lestrade was. I was even guilty of this! And I'm a huge fan of Paul Chequer! So imagine my surprise that there are all these other law enforcement officers wandering about!?! The truth is the world of Sherlock Holmes is a lot bigger than we have come to view it as. There aren't just more cops, there are more continents, more characters, more everything. We just have this confined little Victorian view that this is how it is. If reading all these stories has taught me anything it is that our mindset, when it comes to Sherlock Holmes, needs to expand. It needs to encompass so much more without these assumptions. But then again, everything would be better with a more open mind.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Arthur Conan Doyle, Grotesque, His Last Bow, Lestrade, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Paul Chequer, Rupert Graves, Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlocked, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, The Valley of Fear, WWI

Maurice
Based on the book by E.M. Forster
Starring: James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow, Billie Whitelaw, Barry Foster, Judy Parfitt, Phoebe Nicholls, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Godfrey, Mark Tandy, Kitty Aldridge, Helena Michell, Catherine Rabett, and Peter Eyre
Release Date: September 15th, 1987
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Despite a kindly teacher telling Maurice the facts of life before he ventured out into the "real world" he doesn't really believe that he will be like other men with a wife and a home. This thought of his prepubescent self seems to be prophetic as when he's at college at Cambridge he falls in love with his fellow student Clive Durham. They begin an affair of the heart, not of the body. They leave college and continue to be the center of each others lives. This happy situation can not last. A mutual friend, Risley, who has their predilections is caught in a sting operation and arrested and sentenced to six months hard labor for gross indecency. This incident shakes Clive's life to pieces. He and Maurice have been deluding themselves, and from now on they are to be nothing more than friends. Maurice doesn't want to accept this, but quite quickly he sees that Clive is moving on with his life. Clive is soon married and he and his wife Anne are settling into their country estate, Pendersleigh, and having friends round for the weekend and campaigning, living the life of a country squire. They finally convince Maurice to visit, and it will be a fateful one for Maurice. It is during this visit that he meets Alec Scudder, the under-gamekeeper of Pendersleigh. Despite Maurice trying to "cure" himself via hypnosis, Scudder, and his feelings for him, show Maurice that perhaps he doesn't want to change. Perhaps he has found what he had thought he had with Clive? Only this time is it real?

In college my friends and I used to all pile onto one couch in my parent's house and watch movies. They usually would be OK watching whatever film I had planned on viewing, and seeing as this was during the time when I tried to watch an entire actor's oeuvre, they'd sometimes be stuck watching Richard E. Grant for a summer, as we worked our way from Henry and June to Spice World. Ironically, of the two, I would recommend Spice World as the better film, I think Henry and June actually ended up in an impromptu trip to the liquor store in order to finish it. For some arcane and forgotten reason Maurice was watched on one of these nights. I really can not understand what possessed me to suggest it, this was at the height of my James Wilby hatred, seriously, until the Bertie and Elizabeth TV movie I really thought he was a dick cause he could only play them, plus I was also starting a period of hating Rupert Graves which was never fully broken till Sherlock. There are three conceivable reasons as to why we picked Maurice up at Video Station on that summer night, it was either because of Merchant and Ivory, or Hugh Grant, or because I was trying to find a period film that my friend Matt might be willing to watch. I should note that he did not watch it with us. All I remember of the film is that I was shocked we all remained awake through the whole film. Even the most exciting of films, which this is not, often resulted in nap time... hmm, maybe I should have connected letting me choose the film and nap time prior to now.... Needless to say, the film left almost no impression on me, yet I would gladly go back to that night we all watched it just to have one more night with us all piled on that couch never really thinking it would one day end.

If the movie had spent half as much time finding a properly fitting cast as it did fitting every single square inch of frame with Victorian and Edwardian tat then it would have been a flawless film. Instead it suffers from three bad casting decisions, James Wilby as Maurice, Rupert Graves as the laughable lower class Scudder, he can not pull off that accent in the least, and Ben Kingsley as, well, I'm not quite sure what he's supposed to be, maybe Texan? James Wilby is all wrong because he hadn't developed enough as an actor at this point and has no inherent charm like Hugh Grant. Instead we are left with a hero who is basically a cardboard cut out. At times he was so two-dimensional that I actually think having a cardboard cut out deliver the lines would have been more successful. To have the entire film rest on his shoulders is laughable. A strong force is needed for a title role, and by casting Wilby the movie failed before it started. But this was a failure that was forced on them because Julian Sands pulled out at the last minute. Could Julian Sands have made the film work? I can't tell you that... I can say that Wilby has made films I enjoy while Sands hasn't. As for Scudder... well, there it was just the fault of trying to force an accent one someone who was incapable of doing one. I have come to admire Rupert Graves over the years, but he is distinctly working middle class. The lower class accent combined with the bad grammar and language skills didn't work coming out of his mouth. In fact, they were laughable. But nothing will beat the fact that when Ben Kingsley showed up as the hypnotherapist and launched into his indescribable accent, the film, which was at a tipping point from art to farce until that moment, went straight to farce.

The worst part of the entire movie is the confluence of these three in a dream sequence that was obviously ripped off of Vertigo and threw out every bit of style and structure the film had thus far established. Previously the film is unique in that it lacked a score, any music in the film is classical pieces that usually were practical, a pianola, a gramophone, you get the idea. Yet the dream sequence is scored? That's an odd choice. And floridly scored like an untalented Edwardian Bernard Herrmann dropped by. Then the laying of images over each other with color flashes. This is getting more and more like Vertigo by the second. When Ben Kingsley's head started floating in the center of the screen, I was laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face. I just can't rectify this clash, to have a period film that is so distinctly staid and proper to have this stylistic French new wave interpretive dream makes NO SENSE! Much like in Vertigo, the dream is the crisis point of the movie, it's time for the lead to move forward with their life or forfeit it. But just because we have two characters in the grip of a life altering decision as focused through a fever dream doesn't mean that they should be so similar. Fifty years separate these stories, and that is a gulf that can not be breached. Even if Maurice had tried to incorporate the subconscious trying to tell the conscious self it's true desire, even if there had been some psychoanalysis going on, this was with out a doubt the number one way it should not have been handled.

But the film did handle some issues well, and the changes made aided the film and brought more clarity to the story than the book. The biggest change was how Clive's "conversion" was handled. In the book he just realizes as he's nursed back to health that he is no longer attracted to men. This is very flimsy reasoning. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, James Ivory's usual writing partner, had the inspired idea to actually give justification to this conversion through the underused character of Risley. In the book Risley is important for awakening Maurice's interests and inadvertently introducing him to Clive, and later for recommending the hypnotherapist. Instead we are shown a plausible and slightly hinted at story about what really happened to Risley when he was off stage. Risley is caught in a sting operation to entrap homosexuals, and despite being a Viscount, is sentenced to six months hard labor and may never hold a government position due to his proclivities and his arrest. This terrifies Clive into having cold sweats. Clive is also a well respected member of the aristocracy, he hopes to hold a position in government, and he has been living a double life for years. He has a crisis at a dinner at Maurice's house. Not brought on by his recent illness and the fear of telling Maurice they are through, but because he fears exposure and must give up the one thing that matters to him if he isn't to face the same fate as Risley. This, not only makes more sense, but gives Clive more depth. It shows that his sexual orientation isn't just a phase he was going through, but something that would always be a part of him that he pushed aside in order to survive. The last scene of the movie, with Clive and his wife, after Maurice has confronted Clive about being in love with Scudder, it shows a wistfulness, a longing that what Maurice and Scudder have, that is what he wants but is too scared to embrace.

In fact, much of the film is a refocusing of the narrative on Clive. While this honing in does the story the disservice of sidelining Maurice's family, the truth is their hatred of Maurice doesn't serve the narrative if you are actually trying to make him likable. But the fact is if this film had sidelined Maurice just like it did his family, it could have been a better film. By adding more depth to Clive, seeing the whole story through his eyes becomes far more fascinating then just following around the unsympathetic and flat Maurice. One thing I found interesting though is the film really focused in on Clive as being asexual. He loves men, but never physically. He NEVER acts on his impulses. As we see later with his wife, they too have a very chaste relationship, almost like siblings. The book doesn't go to great lengths to stress the fact that Clive and Maurice's love is unconsummated, and in fact, if it wasn't for Forster's insistence that their love had no physical side in the afterward, I would argue that they did have a physical relationship. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Forster added that afterward to try to make the book more palatable by insisting that it was only Scudder and Maurice getting it on, and that Clive was above reproach, aside from that "phase" he went through prior to Greece, but he never acted on his impulses. Again, I think that this gives Clive more depth. You see him not as someone who had two loves in his life and is now content. Instead he is a man always thwarted by his desires he is trying to repress. It makes him a tragic figure. In the book Clive is just the awakening and Scudder is the prize. Clive being perfectly content in his post Maurice life. This little tweak changes that all. It adds more to the story and with Hugh Grant's portrayal of Clive we are given the one and only redeeming facet of the film.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Asexual, Ben Kinsgley, Bernard Herrmann, E.M. Forster, Forster Fall, Henry and June, Homosexuality, Hugh Grant, James Wilby, Maurice, Richard E. Grant, Risley, Rupert Graves, Sherlock Holmes, Spice Girls, Vertigo

I remember when I was first introduced to the work of E. M. Forster. I don't think anyone can forget the juggernaut that was the 1992 adaptation of Howards End starring Emma Thompson, Vanessa Redgrave, and Anthony Hopkins. It was the darling of the awards circuit garnering nine Academy Award nominations and winning three, Emma Thompson winning her first Oscar. I was in high school when the movie came out and didn't do much reading outside of school, I know that's shocking. But when I finally graduated in 1996 I spent that summer luxuriating in reading. The complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy started my summer, followed by all of Jane Austen. After finishing Austen I was bereft, I was encouraged by a kindly soul to read Forster. I read A Room with a View and was enchanted, despite the shoddy ending, Howards End instantly became one of my favorite books ever, A Passage to India wasn't really my cup of tea, and as for The Longest Journey, the less said the better.

It was apparent to me that Forster was a very uneven writer, and hence I hesitated to read his final two books, even though both had had lavish movie adaptations, one even by Merchant and Ivory. Despite my feeling otherwise time hasn't stood still, and it's almost twenty years now since I first read Forster. Besides wanting to re-read my two favorites, I thought I might as well bite the bullet and finally get around to reading Maurice and Where Angels Fear to Tread. Because my first introduction to Forster was through the Merchant and Ivory adaptation of Howards End I thought it would be fun to combine the two sensory experiences of literature and film. I hope you will join me this month as I delve back into Forster's work, revisiting some old friends and hopefully making some new ones. The one thing you'll be guaranteed of is a lot of Helena Bonham Carter and Rupert Graves, seeing as they couldn't keep themselves away from any adaptation!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Anthony Hopkins, E.M. Forster, Emma Thompson, Forster Fall, Helena Bonham Carter, Howards End, Maurice, Merchant and Ivory, Rupert Graves, Where Angels Fear to Tread

Another member of the Redgrave dynasty has died today, and the acting world has lost an amazing man. Corin Redgrave had been battling cancer for the last 10 years but has left behind a legacy of acting beyond compare and political activism. From stage to screen he was a force to be reckoned with. Though perhaps best known for his performance as Andie McDowell's Scottish husband in Four Weddings and a Funeral, for me, he will always be old Jolyon from The Forsyte Saga. His death scene at Robin Hill with Irene is heartwrentching. I think it only fitting to reprint the words Rupert Graves uttered as young Jolyon at his father's passing:

Posted by Miss Eliza at 3:47 PM 0 comments  

Labels: Andie McDowell, Corin Redgrave, Cymbeline, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Irene, Jolyon, Redgrave, Robin Hill, Rupert Graves, The Forsyte Saga