Camera, Obscura......

A sleazy night's movie-going, initiating the 'tone' for a gloomy early morning, subsidized by the last of the civet bean coffee and last drops of Kalona Supernatural heavy cream, now abandoned, even by Whole Foods....triple-feature at the All Night Picture Show: Jean-Jacque Beneix's seldom seen "Art" film, Moon In The Gutter....that motivated me to get that Richard Avedon Photograph of Nastassia, wrapped in a giant python: decadently sad The Happy Prince....biopic of Oscar Wilde's last days, in Paris, begging for money to buy 'escorts', absinthe, cigarettes and liquor; and the 1993 Nicolas Roeg interpretation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, that I had the good sense to pause, then delete, as the morning sun failed to glimmer through the eastern window, passing behind a thick, dark cloud....I must, somewhere around here, have that old copy of A Wonderful Life......Yes...put away that DVD of Querelle, Reed! Else this become a rainy Fassbinder morning, before the birds awaken to Dawn.......The golden sun is a fine thing, but I am a child of the moon, after all.....but have the good sense to prefer a silken divan with goose down pillows to a hard, wet rock in the Matchless Mine, Horace!

Summer and Smoke.....over a half century later..... another perspective........

watching Summer and Smoke @ 3 am.......The exemplary acting of Lawrence Harvey made Tennessee William's stagey old-school dramaturgy and the proscenium-bowing righteous acting of all its other actors seem like high school drama department stuff........I recalled another Harvey film, done around the same time......the remake of Of Human Bondage....where Harvey is better 'matched' by Kim Novak...their 'real life' dislike of one another adding some dynamics, maybe..... in some of the film's similar scenes.......Two films in which Harvey plays a young doctor who eventually rejects his female suitor after she 'comes on to him' after he had, earlier, made some 'moves' on them......It's time for remakes of both films, retaining the innuendos that were only inferential during the repressive 1950's and early 1960's, before the floodgates of 'un-expurgation' and "R" & "M" separated adults from 'children'..... That transitional phase between curtain and footlight acting and post-1950 'Methodism' which, thankfully, led to modern Naturalism.......I've already imagined a remake of Summer and Smoke...with Cate Blanchett and Lawrence Harvey.....just digitally remove Geraldine Page..which would not even be a consideration, had Margaret Leighton landed the role.... although Page's performance....at the time....was considered 'Golden Globe Worthy'!!.., John McIntire, whose talents were better served in formula Westerns; Pamela Tiffin, playing her 'kitten with a whip' schtick.....leave Rita Moreno who, even then, is always...and still is.....'on point', although she had to suffer through the racist posturing, still prevalent at that time....(and, later, "bitched" about this)....Ahem!.... And, incidentally, suffering through having to watch Edith Head's horrid costume designs in Summer and Smoke led me to ponder "how on earth did she get the Breakfast At Tiffanys gig!!"? Oh, that was really Hubert de Givenchy, wasn't it? Harvey's attire, was, as always....impeccable.......