Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/20/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, June 20, 2019

Dream Wife (Sidney Sheldon, 1953)

Betta St. John, Cary Grant, and Deborah Kerr in Dream Wife

Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Betta St. John, Walter Pidgeon, Eduard Franz, Buddy Baer. Screenplay: Sidney Sheldon, Herbert Baker, Alfred Lewis Lewitt. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George White. Music: Conrad Salinger.

A romantic comedy so inane and inept that it seems to have driven Cary Grant into retirement for a couple of years, until Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to return in To Catch a Thief (1955). It's certainly a waste of the considerable talents of Grant and Deborah Kerr. Grant plays a businessman who gets tired of his fiancée's (Kerr) devotion to her career with the State Department and calls off the engagement when he falls for a Middle Eastern princess (Betta St. John) who has been raised to serve men. Because the princess comes from an oil-rich country, the State Department enlists Kerr's character in handling the negotiations leading to the princess's marriage to the businessman. The result is a queasy 1950s take on feminism and international relations in which no one behaves like the rational human beings they're supposed to be.