Sunday, January 20, 2013

Catching Up with Quelle (13)

Happy Sunday! How are all of you? I am finally getting around to another edition of Catching Up with Quelle.


TCM Classic Film Festival - It looks almost certain that Carlos and I will be attending the TCM Classic Film Festival in April. We have our tickets and our hotel booked. All we need is to buy plane tickets. There is still a chance we won't be able to go but it looks more certain that we will than it did before. I am excited to go, to see Hollywood, to meet a lot of classic film fans and of course to watch some great movies!


New Robert Mitchum iPhone Case - Remember the Robert Mitchum iPhone case I had custom made in September? Well it broke. I have a tendency to drop my iPhone a lot. So I got a new one and am determined to not abuse my iPhone as much so I can keep this case a lot longer. Otherwise this will be an expensive new hobby of mine!

I like this iPhone case better than the last one. It's a great colorful of image of Robert Mitchum's 1953 visit to Hawaii. If you want to create your own custom iPhone case, I recommend using CafePress. You can get one made for $25 but I suggest you wait for a sale or a good coupon code. I ended up getting a few dollars knocked off the price with a custom iPhone case sale.


Sidney Poitier's letter to President Roosevelt - I love the blog Letters of Note which shares real letters from notable figures. They include a scan of the real letter along with the text typed out for those who may not be able to read the handwriting. I have read some of the most fascinating and endearing letters on that blog. Recently they posted a letter from a young Sidney Poitier to President Roosevelt. Poitier wrote the letter before he became a famous actor and when he was poor living in the U.S. and hoping to get a loan from President Roosevelt so he could go back to his family in Nissau. It's a very intriguing letter given the time period and also how Poitier became such a successful actor in the U.S. afterwards. You can find it here:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013/01/my-name-is-sidney-poitier.html

Classic Film Books on Goodreads - Do you love books on classic films as much as I do? Please come join me on Goodreads and add to my Classic Film Books list and vote for your favorites. I'm thinking of starting a book club but am not sure if there is enough interest. So I thought I'd start off with a list to see how it goes:
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/30492.Classic_Film_Books


Thursday, January 17, 2013

5 films you can watch for free on TCM.com

Did you know that TCM (Turner Classic Movies) has 5 full-length feature films from the 1930s available to watch for free on their website? I have listed the films below and have included the video. The links are to the IMDB pages and the Media Room - TCM page for each movie.

This is nothing new. These films have been available for years in the Media Room of the TCM website but I am not sure how many people are aware of them. So I thought I'd post them here. They are free and available to watch at anytime. I'm not sure about country restriction but these should be available for anyone in the U.S. at least.

I highly recommend Double Harness (1933). I have seen that film a couple times and it's a good pre-code starring William Powell and Ann Harding. Also, Topper (1937) is just a delight and I enjoyed Living on Love (1937) too.

I hope TCM will consider posting a few more of these in the future!

Update: I tried to embed all the movies on this page but it wasn't working. So I left up just one of them: Double Harness.

Friday, January 11, 2013

I Do and I Don't by Jeanine Basinger

I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies
by Jeanine Basinger
9780307269164
Hardcover
Alfred A. Knopf (Random House)
On Sale: January 29, 2013

Find the book on:
Powells
Indiebound
Barnes and Noble
Amazon


“... the traditional role for both the marriage movie and the divorce movie is to tell the audience to keep on going. ‘I do, and I don’t, but I do.’ – that’s the story of the American marriage movie.” – Jeanine Basinger

When you think about love in the movies, the first thing that might come to mind is courtship. The game in which two people fall madly in love and want to be together but something gets in their way. The story of this lovestruck couple ends with a happily ever after or in tears. Marriage is just as important a theme as courtship in classic film but is often overlooked. In I Do and I Don’t, film historian Jeanine Basinger takes a close look at those movies that focus on the marriage aspect of a relationship. Her sharp focus on this particular type of movie spans the length of film’s history but primarily rests upon the time period of the 1920s to the 1960s when marriage was more culturally significant. The influence of this is reflected in the various marriage (and divorce) movies that resulted from the era. This book is not intended to be a scholarly text nor is it intended to be anything other than a general study of marriage movies in the film industry.

Basinger writes in her Author's Note:

"...this book is an overview of how commercial movies told the story of marriage, and how they used it to draw audiences into the theater. The book is descriptive, historical and personally speculative.It's about what the average person saw and heard at the movie theater. Nothing more and nothing less."

So what is a marriage movie exactly? The key here is to look at films which deal with marriage. Either the problem in the marriage is the crisis of the plot or the story happens to a married couple. Basinger identfies 7 different types of problems in marriage movies:

1) Money
2) Infidelity/Adultery
3) In-Laws and Children
4) Incompatibility
5) Class
6) Addiction
7) Murder

In the beginning of the book, Basinger discusses marriage in the movie at length, its significance, the difficulty filmmakers had using it as a plot device and the audience desire to see the “I do” or “I don’t but I do” situation played out. Audiences went to the movies for escape but also wanted to be able to relate to the characters and the difficulties they were experiencing. Marriage was a good plot device to achieve just that whether it was in a good comedy or drama.

As the book progresses, Basinger goes on to look at the 7 different types of marriage movies closely. She uses many examples and explains how each demonstrate that particular marriage problem in its own way. Spoilers are a necessary evil in these book as it is very important to look at the entire workings of a plot to extrapolate the meaning as well as to exemplify the role of marriage in the movie. If you are a film buff who has an extensive movie viewing history or you don't care as much about spoilers and are interested in the film industry, then you will not have any problems reading this book. I found myself skipping a few of the movies discussed primarily because the first couple sentences captured my interest and I didn’t want to ruin the movie with spoilers. I wrote those films down to watch them later. My advanced readers copy did not have an index but I am assuming the final book does which will help in going back to particular films in the future.

The book has a lot of footnotes. This disrupts the reading quite a bit, as footnotes normally do, and I think with some clever editing a lot of the footnotes could have been worked into the main text. There are numerous photographs included with fun explanatory captions. Where photos appear, they are paired in twos and threes and for the most part relate to one another. They often compare two or three different movies, show different situations in a story (for example: before and after) or show different themes. I think these work incredibly well and I was happy to see them.

The last part of the book focuses on how TV took over the marriage story as it worked beautifully for the TV format. It also looks at modern cinema and it’s current trouble with the marriage story. I very much enjoyed how Basinger looked at Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s on screen and off screen marriage as a sort of parallel story to the history of marriage in TV and film.

I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies is a well organized and enlightening book; a must-read for any film buff who wants to enhance their knowledge of film history.

Here are some notable films that were discussed in the book:


Woman of the Year (1942)
Cass Timerlane (1947)
Two for the Road (1967)
The Thin Man (1934)
Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
We're Not Married (1952)
They Died With Their Books On (1941)
Blondie serials
Ma & Pa Kettle serials
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)
Brief Encounter (1945)
The Facts of Life (1960)
No Room for the Groom (1952)
The various adaptations of The Painted Veil
The Painted Veil (1934)
The Seventh Sin (1957)
The Painted Veil (2006)

Jeanine Basinger is the author of books about classic film including The Star Machine (highly recommended!) and Silent Stars.

Disclaimer: I received an advanced reader’s copy from Alfred A. Knopf (Random House). It had black and white interior with no index in the back.

Popular Posts

 Twitter   Instagram   Facebook