Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/07/25

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, March 7, 2025

Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949)

Patricia Knight and Cornel Wilde in Shockproof

Cast: Cornel Wilde, Patricia Knight, John Baragrey, Esther Minciotti, Howard St. John, Russell Collins, Charles Bates. Screenplay: Helen Deutsch, Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr. Art direction: Carl Anderson. Film editing: Gene Havlick. Music: George Duning.

Two great stylists of film, Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller, met on Shockproof and collided with the Hollywood studio system. The movie, about a by-the-book parole officer who falls for a sexy parolee, was supposed to end with the officer (Cornel Wilde) going rogue for love of the parolee (Patricia Knight), which he does for a while until the movie fizzles into a wholly unconvincing upbeat ending. It's a "curate's egg" of a movie: Some of it is very good -- the noirish parts written by Fuller, and the touches of Sirkian melodrama -- but on the whole it stinks.