Four Romance Movies With Very Different Plots

Title: The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
Director: John Cromwell
Language: English
Rating: Not Rated

Oliver Bradford (Robert Young) is a WWII vet who suffered disfiguring injuries. Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire) works as a maid (and also has a strong talent for wood-carving art). Pretty much everyone dismisses her as plain. Oliver and Laura become friends and marry for companionship, but some time after their wedding they begin to perceive each other as beautiful, as if a transformation has come over their physical appearance.

There are a few things I like about this movie:

- Generally good acting, especially a touching performance from McGuire, showing Laura's kindness and profound sadness and loneliness, a burning desire to be loved combined with the torment of knowing that it's highly unlikely. Herbert Marshall also puts in a lovely appearance as a blind pianist (who lost his sight in the First World War), and Mildred Natwick is surprising as a housekeeper who could have been a creepy Mrs. Danvers type of figure, but instead is supportive of other people's love even though her own prospects for happiness were bitterly thwarted.

- The movie shows the perniciousness of pity – not just self-pity, but also treating another person as pitiable rather than helping them see what's good, blessed, and possible in their lives, and doing so in a way that isn't condescending.

- I also liked how the movie depicted the uneasiness around "ugly people." This uneasiness exists in the filmmakers themselves and in the audience. The two main characters are what can be called "Hollywood ugly." Oliver hardly looks like the Phantom of the Opera, and while Laura does look remarkably more plain in comparison to her physically transformed self, she still has a facial structure and figure for conventional beauty. In the romantic moments between the couple, we see them as they see each other – the loved one rendered physically beautiful. Would the audience have enjoyed watching them kiss passionately if they were both still shown in their plainer state?

Hobson's Choice (1954): Biting humor and surprising warmth

Title: Hobson's Choice
Director: David Lean
Language: English
Rating: Not Rated

Watching Hobson's Choice made me happy. It's British comedy at its best, with brilliant characters, a tender and hilarious romance, and a satisfying ending.

Set in the late 19th century in England, the movie features Henry Hobson (Charles Laughton), who runs a bootmaking business and who abandons his shop every day to go drinking. He lets himself do this because he's got three grown daughters running the shop for him for free; the younger two are a bit flighty, but the oldest, Maggie (Brenda de Banzie), is smart and has a strong business acumen. He's counting on the fact that she'll remain a spinster and take care of him and his shop until he dies; he's also not too eager to marry off his younger daughters, Alice (Daphne Anderson) and Vicky (Prunella Scales), as he's reluctant to spend money on a wedding. In this way the movie starts: Maggie overseeing the shop and the other daughters helping out, while a talented but extremely humble boothand, Will Mossop (John Mills), toils away in the cellar to make the high-quality footwear the shop is known for. Henry Hobson, in the meantime, drinks and jokes around.

10 reasons to watch Gaslight (1944)

Title: Gaslight
Director: George Cukor
Language: English
Rating: PG

Synopsis
Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) used to live with her aunt, a famous opera singer who was strangled to death in her own home. Years later, when studying music in Italy, Paula falls in love with and marries Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), a pianist. The two move back to her aunt's old home in a pretty London square, where Gregory patiently sets about destroying her sanity.

(The expression gaslighting - when you deliberately cause someone to doubt their own sanity, judgment, and other mental faculties - comes from the 1930s play on which this movie is based, though the movie itself is what really popularized its usage.)

Good Short Fiction: 3 stories from Carry On, Jeeves

Collection: Carry On, Jeeves
Author: P.G. Wodehouse (Pelham Grenville Wodehouse)

Carry On, Jeeves centers on Bertie Wooster, a jovial air-headed upper-class English bachelor, and his manservant, the cool, impeccable and intelligent Jeeves (a "gentleman's gentleman"), who manages Bertie's life and rescues him and his friends from various mishaps. The stories are set in the early 20th century; a gentleman like Bertie could have an easy-going life waking up late, dining at his club, and drinking throughout the day. Carry On, Jeeves is a fun collection; I didn't read more than one or two stories at a time - there are plot points that tend to repeat, though Wodehouse's cleverness with the English language is always a delight and the main reason I read his work. These are the stories that stood out for me:

The Aunt and the Sluggard
Most of the stories feature one of Bertie's close friends who is usually a slacker with a silly nickname (e.g. Biffy or Sippy). In this one the layabout is nicknamed Rocky (short for Rockmetteller); he lives in a cabin out on Long Island, NY where he spends most of the month sleeping and meditating on the movements of earthworms, except for a few days where he writes bad poetry that gets lapped up by American magazines. One reason I'm recommending this story is the poetry, a fine example of Wodehouse's satirical talents:

Be!
Be!
The past is dead,
Tomorrow is not born.
Be today!
Today!

In Wooster-Jeeves stories there's often a domineering aunt or uncle making demands on a slacker nephew. Bertie suffers such oppression from his Aunt Agatha, but in this story the victim is Rocky. His aunt lives out in the Midwest and would like him to send her colorful descriptions of life in New York City; in exchange she'll give him money and keep him in her will. Most men would be ecstatic at such a deal, but Rocky isn't most men; the thought of living in NYC, away from his cabin and earthworms, is horrifying to him.

Fortunately for him Bertie happens to be visiting NYC, and the plan is to send Jeeves out to do research on the city's high life; the image of Jeeves smoking a fat cigar at a cabaret and scrutinizing 5th Avenue fashions is classic. Of course things get complicated when Rocky's aunt, enthralled by his accounts of city life, decides to visit. Meantime Bertie and Jeeves have their own angst to work through. Another recurring plot point in these stories is Bertie rebelling against Jeeves by wearing a hideous outfit or refusing to shave his mustache. It's a regular battle of wills between them. Invariably they work through these rough patches in their relationship, with Bertie seeing the error of his ways.

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Bertie Changes His Mind
It's strange to think of a Wooster-Jeeves story as dark, but this one has a darkness to it. Rather than being told from Bertie's point-of-view, we hear the tale from Jeeves. Jeeves is always clever, resourceful and manipulative, but the way he manages Bertie in this story is a little disturbing - he squashes Bertie's unprecedented desire for a more meaningful life. At the beginning of the story Bertie is out-of-sorts and wonders if there's more to life than waking up late, drinking, and being amiable. He considers inviting his sister and her children to live with him for a time, just to see what it would be like to have kids around. To Jeeves these impulses are alarming. If Bertie seriously contemplates marriage, and finally weds and has children, it will likely result in Jeeves having to find another position. Jeeves likes things as they are; he has a comfortable situation, and he has no intention of letting Bertie disrupt the relationship they have established, with Jeeves as a fatherly puppet master and Bertie as a mostly likeable (though at times recalcitrant) child.

There's some hilarious writing here, especially when Jeeves reflects on his former employer, Montague-Todd. As for the method he uses to cure Bertie of any wishes for a family - it's both funny and humiliating. Poor Bertie. Who knows what kind of man he might have become, and what meaning his life might have had, but by the end of the story he's back to his usual self. Settling down at the end of the day he explains to Jeeves why he's contented with his life again:

"I mean, looking at the clock and wondering if you're going to be late with the good old drinks, and then you coming in with the tray always on time, never a minute late, and shoving it down on the table and biffing off, and the next night coming in and shoving it down and biffing off, and the next night - I mean, it gives you a sort of safe, restful feeling. Soothing! That's the word."

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Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest
Bertie's leisurely stay in New York City is disturbed when he finds out he has to look after 23 year old Wilmot (nicknamed "Motty"), the sheltered son of one of Aunt Agatha's friends, Lady Malvern, who hails from Much Middlefold, Shropshire. Wilmot seems at first to be a peaceable twit who will sit quietly in Bertie's apartment sucking on his walking-stick and leafing through books all evening before retiring to bed with a glass of warm milk. What Bertie doesn't count on is that a young man who has never been granted much independence will go wild in a place like NYC. As he explains to Bertie at one point:

"I've been cooped up in the ancestral home at Much Middlefold, in Shropshire, and till you've been cooped up in Much Middlefold you don't know what cooping is! The only time we get any excitement is when one of the choir-boys is caught sucking chocolate during the sermon. When that happens, we talk about it for days. I've got about a month of New York, and I mean to store up a few happy memories for the long winter evenings."

If Wilmot gets in trouble going on wild benders through the city, Bertie will face the double wrath of his Aunt Agatha and of Wilmot's mother. Thankfully Jeeves finds a devious way of helping Bertie out and making sure Motty will be kept confined.

Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest has the distinction of being the first ever Wooster-Jeeves tale I read. I love Bertie's happy ramblings and how they contrast with Jeeves's worldliness, eloquence and masterful understatements. There's no one who talks like Bertie: "Won't you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?" and -

It's only after a bit of breakfast that I'm able to regard the world with that sunny cheeriness which makes a fellow the universal favourite. I'm never much of a lad till I've engulfed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee.

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*I've added this post to Short Stories on Wednesday #8 at the Bread Crumb Reads blog.

Performance artists

In New York:



and old York:



The one from New York (I'll call her the Blanched Ballerina) was posing in Central Park. The one from England (Purple Pedaler?) was in The Shambles.

It seems like both photos captured them mid-motion, but neither one was moving, just being as still as possible and drawing people towards them with their novel presence.

The River Ouse

From my work-trip to York in early September, some pictures of the River Ouse.

A walk on the walls of York

From a morning walk, before the workday started:

Week in Seven Words #32

birth
For close to an hour I sit with my eyes closed; they feel heavy, but sleep won't come. The airplane cabin is dark, most passengers sleeping, and on a restless impulse I pry up the shade on the nearest window and look outside. We're flying into a sunrise. Alongside the plane the skies are dark, but up ahead there's a thick melting band of beautiful orange. Piled above it are successive stripes of yellow-white, then blues darkening to black; at the foot of the sunrise the cloudscape is gray-blue, like the surface of an alien planet. This is the world I live in, and it's a blessing to see it this way.

collaboration
Each scientist seems like a neuron. The neuron has its own activities, its own rate and intensity of firing, but at the same time its actions are inseparable from what other neurons are doing; connections have formed and will form between neighboring neurons or neurons that are at a remove from each other, and while the activity of a single neuron might be relatively simple, when they fire together, or in response to one another, the patterns of activity give rise to complex knowledge and understanding, a broader and more detailed picture of a given phenomenon or entity in the world.

excursions
There's time to explore, both at the beginning of the day and in the evening; there's time to squint at cathedral gargoyles, sip tea in a crowded room with flowers and wide windows, stroll through a garden in dusk when the midges are out and the skies are overcast, climb the narrow steps to a fun museum where a king is cross-examined, walk alongside a shadowed river, and stand at the site of a massacre, yet another eruption of hate and blood lust.

guests
We're with gracious hosts. They give us a place at their table, delicious food, conversation on all sorts of topics, singing and simcha; they offer us reflections on life, the holidays, human nature and purpose and ask us to share our own thoughts. It's a warm room we're in, with light wood floors, shelves with lots of books, and the table (or tables) where everyone gathers. It's the sort of room that can somehow fit forty people almost as easily as it fits seven.

luminance
Sunset as seen from a bench in Hyde Park. It seems like we're sitting within a glass marble streaked with peach, gold, blue, and feathery gray.

perambulation
In the early morning we walk on the walls of a city. On each side there are houses with chimney pots, slopes of green gold grass, brick and stone smattered with ivy, cobbled roads feeding into asphalt streets, dark furrowed trees heavy with leaves, and at our feet snails have emerged after the night's rain.

wordless
There are many different kinds of shofar notes on Rosh Hashanah. Sometimes the notes are precise, efficient and somewhat mechanical; the shofar-blower rises, performs his duties skillfully, and then returns to his seat. Other times the shofar seems to strain against the fabric of the air, against the boundaries of sound itself; there's so much feeling and effort, so much longing and appeal. The shofar blasts and rasps and lets out a wild fierce pleading blare of sound. Other times only a gasp emerges; the shofar-blower pauses, takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes in concentration and makes another attempt. During one round of shofar-blowing a two year old child is laughing wildly; the two sounds together are beautiful - the long yearning note of the shofar, straining with every wordless hope and resolution and plea, and the child pealing happily alongside it.