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

Sunday, February 2, 2020

The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945)

Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady
Cast: Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Patricia Roc, Griffith Jones, Michael Rennie, Felix Aylmer, Enid Stamp-Taylor, Francis Lister, Beatrice Varley, Amy Dalby, Martita Hunt, David Horne, Emrys Jones. Screenplay: Leslie Arliss, Gordon Glennon, Aimée Stuart, based on a novel by Magdalen King-Hall. Cinematography: Jack E. Cox. Art direction: John Bryan. Film editing: Terence Fisher. Music: Hans May. 

Entertaining claptrap about a Restoration beauty (Margaret Lockwood) named Barbara who seduces the wealthy squire Sir Ralph Skelton (Griffith Jones) on the eve of his marriage to the virtuous Caroline (Patricia Roc). But having married Sir Ralph, Barbara quickly becomes bored with life in the country, dresses in men's clothes, sneaks out by a secret passage, and turns highwayman. This puts her in competition with (and the bed of) the notorious Capt. Jerry Jackson (James Mason), the terror of the county's roads. Eventually the wicked are punished and virtue is rewarded, of course. The story needs a little more tongue in cheek than writer-director Leslie Arliss is able to give it, but it moves along nicely. Mason, as usual, gives the standout performance.

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