Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/17/20

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, December 17, 2020

Sidewalk Stories (Charles Lane, 1989)

Charles Lane and Nicole Alysia in Sidewalk Stories

Cast: Charles Lane, Nicole Alysia, Sandye Wilson, Trula Hoosier, Darnell Williams. Screenplay: Charles Lane. Cinematography: Bill Dill. Production design: Ina Mayhew. Film editing: Charles Lane, Ann Stein. Music: Marc Marder.

A low-budget independent classic, with writer-director-producer-editor as a homeless man who, like Charles Chaplin's Tramp in The Kid (1921), gets encumbered with a small child. It's a smart blend of neorealism and sentiment that gets its impetus not only from Chaplin's movie but also from Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). The movie is silent until the very end, when its message about homelessness is verbalized.

Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932)

Charles Laughton in Island of Lost Souls

Cast: Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi, Kathleen Burke, Arthur Hohl, Stanley Fields, Paul Hurst, Hans Steinke, Tetsu Komai, George Irving. Screenplay: Waldemar Young, Philip Wylie, based on a novel by H.G. Wells. Cinematography: Karl Struss. Art direction: Hans Dreier.