Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/15/22

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, September 15, 2022

Shining Victory (Irving Rapper, 1941)

Cast: James Stephenson, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Donald Crisp, Barbara O’Neil, Montagu Love, Sig Ruman, G.P. Huntley, Leonard Mudie, Doris Lloyd. Screenplay: Howard Koch, Anne Froelich, based on a play by A.J. Cronin. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Max Steiner.

Shining Victory – not to be confused with Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939) or Bright Victory (Mark Robson, 1951) – is a solid Warner Bros. product about a research physician (James Stephenson) who gets exiled to a private sanitarium in Scotland after accusing a senior researcher of stealing his work for an article about the treatment of dementia praecox, which we now call schizophrenia. Embittered by the experience, he snarls at and offends his colleagues until he’s assigned an assistant for his work: a lovely young woman (Geraldine Fitzgerald) just graduated from medical school. “A woman!” he sneers, and his scorn is compounded when he learns that she wants to be a medical missionary in China after her term as his assistant is over. Eventually, she wins him over – largely, it seems, by cleaning up his messy lab – and they fall in love. But things are not to be…. Based on a play called Jupiter Laughs by A.J. Cronin, the movie is more interested in getting the two doctors together than in his research, although his somewhat dodgy workaround of medical ethics is what produces the film’s crisis. Bette Davis, who co-starred with Fitzgerald in the aforementioned Dark Victory, has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo as a nurse.