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

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Friday, January 9, 2026

The Fan (Otto Preminger, 1949)

George Sanders, Jeanne Crain, and Richard Greene in The Fan

Cast: Jeanne Crain, George Sanders, Madeleine Carroll, Richard Greene, Martita Hunt, John Sutton, Hugh Dempster, Richard Ney, Virginia McDowall. Screenplay: Ross Evans, Dorothy Parker, Walter Reisch, based on a play by Oscar Wilde. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Leland Fuller, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof. 

Uncharacteristically lackluster direction by Otto Preminger mars The Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan. Like so many movies from stage plays, it hashes things up to meet the demands of motion pictures for action and change of scenery, adding a "frame story" that takes place in London after the end of World War II. An elderly Mrs. Erlynne (Madeleine Carroll) discovers the titular fan at an auction of things retrieved from the rubble left by the bombing of the city and seeks out Lord Darlington (George Sanders) to prove her rightful ownership. Flash back to the action of the play. Wilde's aphorisms are chopped up and scattered in the dialogue of the film, as it becomes less a battle of wits and more a domestic drama. Sanders, Carroll, and Martita Hunt retain some of the play's essence in their performances, but Jeanne Crain and Richard Greene are pallid versions of the Windermeres. 

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