Turner Classic Movies 31 Days of Oscars

Don't forget me while I'm away! Come back to this site and check out TCM's DayORam for their 31 Days of Oscars festival.

Hiatus

I have to take a short hiatus from posting to concentrate on schoolwork. No worries, I'll be back. In the meantime, I leave you with a funny scene from A Night at the Opera (1935). It's a little fuzzy, but still enjoyable. Please enjoy. With two hard-boiled eggs! ::honk:: make that three hard-boiled eggs!

... and two hard boiled eggs.

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Searching for A Patch of Blue in cloudy skies

When I started my last semester, taking on a full-time school load as well as maintaining a full-time workload, I had a burning desire to watch Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) (see previous entry). Something about 2 people tackling on a ginormous family gave me comfort with my load which seemed tiny in comparison. This time however, at the eve of the Spring semester, I felt like watching a very different movie from the Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda comedy.

On the eve of the Spring semester, I watched a film that I absoltutely love. I throw around the word "love" pretty loosely when talking about films. But in this case I have an emotional attachment to this particular movie as it finds its way into the recesses of my emotions and touches my heart on a deeper level than most of my regular cinematic experiences ever dare to delve into. This film is A Patch of Blue (1965).

A Patch of Blue has been on regular rotation on TCM for a few years. There is a good chance that on a quiet Sunday afternoon, you may find this playing on the channel. My first instincts were to change the channel. But after I watched the short documentary "A Cinderella named Elizabeth" (1965), which shows how Elizabeth Hartman got her first movie role as Selina D'Arcy in A Patch of Blue, I was curious to see how her performance turned out. The result, a movie that took my breath away.

If you haven't seen it yet, in a nutshell, this film is about a young African-American man, Gordon (played by the very handsome Sidney Poitier), who befriends a blind girl who is optimistic about life even though she lives with her promiscuous and abusive mother, Rose-ann (played by Shelley Winters), and her drunk grandfather (last performance by Wallace Ford). The two fall in love in a society in which miscegenation is a threat to a society that values the separation of races.

Why do I watch this film now, before my last big crazy-busy semester of my graduate school career? Because I love it and watching a film I love always comforts me in times of crisis. And also because watching poor Selina D'Arcy live a horrid life of destitution and abuse, on top of being blind, and to watch her still have a happy outlook on life reminds me to appreciate what I have and to not complain!