MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: CHARLEY’S AUNT (1942)

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Like just about everyone with an interest in the movies, I'm watching more films on DVD and going out to movie houses a lot less. Convenience trumps the better experience.
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It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.)
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Thursday, May 15, 2008

CHARLEY’S AUNT (1942)

This inexplicably enjoyable version of the old farce really shouldn’t work at all. Archie Mayo ’s megging had become positively geriatric, the flat lighting makes the entire cast look vaguely ill, the clowning is too broad by half and who is going to believe Jack Benny (pushing fifty) as a student at Oxford. No matter. Brandon Thomas’s indestructible play, imagine THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST meets SOME LIKE IT HOT, starts working its magic from the moment Benny gets into his dress. One big sequence at a formal dinner hangs fire, but just about everything else remains hilarious.

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Thursday, May 15, 2008

CHARLEY’S AUNT (1942)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE