Lauren Bacall@100

#LaurenBacall100

Lauren Bacall Billboard, 1948 King Syndicate

 illustration by Dal Holcomb

Rajnigandha, 1974@50...Early Sprouts of Different Love?

Katherine J. Chen, ‘In Praise of “Plain” Heroines: Why Mary is my Favorite Bennet Sister ‘, Literary Hub, July 23 2018:

“...Could Mary Bennet, in actuality, be considered the bravest, most self-assured, and most independent of her sisters? Pride and Prejudice tends to throw women in two black-and-white categories: wives and spinsters. But with her outspokenness and her desire for “knowledge and accomplishments,”  Mary seems the most well placed to break the suffocating confines of the traditional marriage plot. Ironically, with everything going against her, she is also the most likely of anyone to defy expectations and, ultimately, to surprise....”

I watched Rajnigandha, 1974,  after a few decades, on Hotstar in November 2019.

My feeling:  How it could have turned out to be a wonderful story of lesbian love (not exactly 'Blue Is the Warmest Color', 2013) without any nudity. It's to the credit to the director Basu Chatterjee (1930-) that he has allowed the film (at least for people like me) to take some hue of that love.

It's possible that the love is largely one sided....married Ira (played well by Rajita Thakur) developing those feelings towards single Deepa (played by the late Vidya Sinha), primarily because of the long absence of her husband. But it could be a little more than just the absence of male intimacy and heterogeneous sex. 

I really enjoyed the scenes between Ira and Deepa.

Especially the ones where while sleeping in the same bed of Deepa, Ira puts her leg around Deepa's body and they keep gossiping well into the night. No sex is shown or hinted at. At the beginning at the scene it's Deepa who says that Ira is giving Deepa her husband's place!

Or when Ira bids goodbye to Deepa at the station, whispering how their nights together would be missed.

I found it all very beautiful and moving. 

all pictures above, courtesy of the copyright owner of the film

Jane Greer@100...Still In the Present

When I had not read any of the below stuff, I was swept off my feet by Greer's performance when I first saw Out of the Past, 1947...

 

"...Los Angeles Times film critic Edwin Schallert smartly observed, “It took a woman’s discerning eye to discover Jane Greer as a real actress in the movies.”

 

That talent would soon be recognized by the studio’s new production head. “Jane Greer is the new white hope at RKO,” declared columnist Sheilah Graham. “Her boss, Dore Schary, predicts big things for her—based on her two latest movie performances.” Of course, she would exceed all expectations. Out of the Past established her as a leading lady for the next decade...."

 

 With Robert Mitchum in Out of The Past

 

An Ordinary Day and A Special Day

 Philip Larkin's Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

 

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

 

"Shadows", 1887 by Charles Courtney Curran

director Ettore Scola's "A Special Day", 1977 featuring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren

Carol Reed& Graham Greene's 'The Third Man' @75...Orson Welles and James McNeill Whistler

I must have seen The Third Man a few times. What I like most about it is portrayal of Europe after WWII. And its darkness. 

John Gray, August 10 2012:

""In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

When Orson Welles spoke these lines as Harry Lime, the charismatic villain at the heart of the film The Third Man, released in 1949, Welles can't have realised how they would resonate ever after. Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay, credited the lines to Welles, and it seems clear the actor added them when some extra dialogue was needed while the film was being shot.

The lines became lodged in the mind because they encapsulated an uncomfortable and at the same time compelling idea. His history may not have been factually accurate - the Swiss were a major military power in Renaissance times and the cuckoo clock originated some time later in Bavaria - but the idea that culture thrives in conditions of war and tyranny has an undeniable basis in fact..." 

What could be the ultimate source of the cuckoo clock line?

Wikipedia:

"...The likeliest source is the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In a lecture on art from 1885 (published in Mr Whistler's "Ten O'Clock" [1888]), he said "The Swiss in their mountains ... What more worthy people! ... yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!" In a 1916 reminiscence,[29] American painter Theodore Wores said that he "tried to get an acknowledgment from Whistler that San Francisco would some day become a great art center on account of our climatic, scenic and other advantages. 'But environment does not lead to a production of art,' Whistler retorted. 'Consider Switzerland. There the people have everything in the form of natural advantages—mountains, valleys and blue sky. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!"..."