Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/30/19

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

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Westward Passage (Robert Milton, 1932)

Laurence Olivier and Ann Harding in Westward Passage

Cast: Ann Harding, Laurence Olivier, Irving Pichel, Zasu Pitts, Juliette Compton, Irene Purcell, Emmett King, Florence Roberts, Ethel Griffies, Don Alvarado, Bonita Granville, Florence Lake, Edgar Kennedy, Herman Bing. Screenplay: Margaret Ayer Barnes, Bradley King, Humphrey Pearson. Cinematography: Lucien N. Andriot. Art direction: Carroll Clark. Film editing: Charles Craft. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Laurence Olivier made an early try at American movie stardom with this creaky marital drama, and its failure sent him back to England and success on the stage. He plays an egotistical would-be writer, Nick Allen, who makes things hard for his wife, Olivia (Ann Harding), and their small daughter. After trying to make a go of it, they divorce and she re-marries. Both find success, she in marriage and he in writing, but when they meet again on a ship bound for America from Europe, he tries to rekindle their relationship. It's a fairly flimsy movie, and Olivier looks alarmingly skinny and lupine.