Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/11/24

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

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Forbidden (Frank Capra, 1932)

Adolphe Menjou and Barbara Stanwyck in Forbidden

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Dorothy Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, Myrna Fresholt, Charlotte Henry, Oliver Eckhardt. Screenplay: Frank Capra, Jo Swerling. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Film editing: Maurice Wright.

If you can bring yourself to believe that Barbara Stanwyck's character would spend her life devoted to Adolphe Menjou's, you might like Forbidden. Its writer and director, Frank Capra, didn't, almost apologizing for it in his memoirs. Menjou was a fine character actor with a film career that stretched from 1916 to 1960, but he was no leading man. He was the guy you called on for suave but starchy, not for a lifetime of illicit passion. In Forbidden he's a lawyer and aspiring politician who meets Stanwyck's Lulu on a cruise to Havana. She's a librarian longing for romance, so she spends all her savings on that fateful cruise. They meet cute, of course: He's a little drunk and somehow mistakes her room, No. 66, for his, No. 99. Unfortunately, he's married (she doesn't know this till later) and unwilling to divorce his wife because she was seriously injured in an automobile accident he caused. But they keep seeing each other after they return to the States, she gets pregnant, and through a preposterous series of events winds up letting him and his wife adopt the child she gives birth to. Meanwhile, his political career takes off, although he has made an enemy of a newspaper editor (Ralph Bellamy), who just happens to be Lulu's boss and who wants to marry her. This elaborate contraption of a plot creaks and groans its way to a denouement that's as improbable as the rest of ir. If anything redeems the movie, it's Stanwyck's professionalism, her commitment to creating a character that's almost credible while you're watching her, but really doesn't when you think about it afterward. Capra also directs as if his story makes sense, which is no small feat.