Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/23/19

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, August 23, 2019

Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)

Cast: Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden, Howard St. John, Frank Otto, Larry Oliver, Barbara Brown, Grandon Rhodes, Claire Carlton. Screenplay: Albert Mannheimer, Garson Kanin, based on a play by Garson Kanin. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Friedrich Hollaender.

Judy Holliday's best actress Oscar win, over the classic performances of Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. and Bette Davis in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, still ranks as one of the award's more jaw-dropping moments. But if there was ever a case for a three-way tie, this might be it. Because Holliday's Billie Dawn is a great performance, and it lacked the comeback aura of Swanson's or the career-valedictory overtones of Davis's. She had, of course, perfected the role on Broadway, but it's also to her credit that she never seems stagy, even in the confines of what is too often a filmed play dogged a bit by the censors.