Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/21/19

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

Friday, June 21, 2019

My Name Is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis, 1945)

May Whitty in My Name Is Julia Ross

Cast: Nina Foch, May Whitty, George Macready, Roland Varno, Anita Sharp-Bolster, Doris Lloyd. Screenplay: Muriel Roy Bolton, based on a novel by Anthony Gilbert. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Jerome Pycha Jr. Film editing: Henry Batista. Costume design: Jean Louis.

A tidy, twisty thriller about a woman (Nina Foch) who, when she gets hired as a secretary to a wealthy elderly woman (May Whitty) who lives in a lonely, isolated old house by the sea, becomes a pawn in a plot to cover up a murder. It's one of the films -- another is Gun Crazy (1950) -- that suggest that Joseph H. Lewis could have been more than just a B-movie director. Short (65 minutes) and to the point.