Kick-Back Friday: June 2009 Archives
Middlemarch
(1994): If you can't get through the book (I'm talking to you, English majors), then watch the BBC mini-series—a highly faithful adaptation of George Eliot's novel (written by Andrew Davies of Pride and Prejudice fame).Dorothea Brooke believes that life's purpose can be found in marriage to a fussy academic, the elderly Reverend Casabaun, while she cultivates a sympathic friendship with his disinherited cousin, the fetching Will Ladislaw (Rufus Sewell). The parallel lives of two other couples (the earnest Dr. Lydgate and his spoiled wife; a ne'er-do-well aristocrat and his long-suffering country sweetheart) are intertwined for the obligatory contrast and comparison.
The Damned Don't Cry! (1950): A 40-something Joan Crawford still rocks a body as a ruthless, faux socialite. Nothing—and I mean nothing—detracts from Crawford, thanks mostly to a B-movie supporting cast. Still it's a brave star who's willing to receive an on-camera beating from one of those second-string actors.
When it debuted in 1991, Billy Bathgate—based on the novel by E. L. Doctorow—was generally faintly praised (Vincent Canby) or soundly panned (Roger Ebert). Perhaps the lukewarm reception had something to do with overblown expectations and rumors of production troubles on director Robert Benton's set. But the film is notably sustained by a young Loren Dean as the titular street kid. Dean (Mumford, "Bones"), who never quite developed the career that this movie would have forecasted, strikes a nice reactive-proactive balance as the protege of gangster Dutch Schulz (Dustin Hoffman) and the protector of his boss's mistress (Nicole Kidman).
The comedy and gravity of global espionage are explored in Our Man in Havana (1959), Carol Reed's adaption of the Graham Greene novel. A humble vacuum cleaner salesman in prerevolutionary Cuba, Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness) adds to his income by exploiting the pyramid structure of British intelligence. With its uneven tone, the movie's never quite what it could be; but Greene shows off a blithe cynicism in the story's fantasy-to-reality turnabout. With Burl Ives, Ernie Kovacs, and a-not-particularly-well-cast Maureen O'Hara.
