Avanti!
One of my all-time favorites,
this was Billy Wilder’s best movie, much better than Some Like it Hot. If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a
treat. A wonderful plot for an off-beat
romantic comedy, starring Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills, with the incomparable
Clive Revill and a host of wonderful Italian character actors lending support. It was filmed on the Italian island of Ischia
and released in 1972. As the movie
opens, executive Wendell Armbruster Jr. is boarding an Al Italia flight for
Italy to claim the body of his father and return it to Baltimore for a huge
funeral, to be attended by everybody who is anybody in 1972, including Henry
Kissinger and Billy Graham. To tell you more would be criminal. By all means see it.
Pride and Prejudice
The 1940 film starred Green
Garson as Elizabeth Bennett and Laurence Olivier as Darcy. Squeezing the story
into two hours required some compromises, which limit the impact of this one
and the 2005 film starring Kiera Knightly.
Still, if you have only two hours, the 1940 black-and-white film is the
better movie. Most Jane Austen
aficionados (like me) prefer the 1995 miniseries starring Colin Firth and
Jennifer Ehle. A special delight is
David Bamber’s portrayal of Mr. Collins. But my favorite production of an
Austen novel is the 2008 miniseries
Sense and Sensibility
which is outstanding. Hattie Morahan (sense) gives what may be the
truest depiction of an Austen heroine that I’ve ever seen, and Charity
Wakefield is almost as good as Marianne, her sister (sensibility). A bonus, for
Downton Abbey fans, is the opportunity to see Dan Stevens before he was Matthew
Crawley. This is a first-class
production, with good writing (Andrew Davies), excellent acting, and beautiful
scenery. Best of all, it ties everything
up in three one-hour episodes.
Woman Times Seven
Speaking of Downton Abbey,
which adds Shirley MacLain to the cast in Season 3, those who want to see
Shirley as she was in 1967 might sample this series of seven short stories, all
starring Ms MacLain. Only two of the seven are worth your time – the first,
co-starring Peter Sellers, and one other, featuring MacLain as a Parisian
grande dame who is infuriated to find that the dress she plans to wear to the
Paris Opera has been copied by a rival. The entire movie was filmed in Paris. A
much better look at la MacLain in her youth is The Apartment, filmed in 1960.
Romantics Anonymous
Death at a Funeral
By no means a memorable
movie, Romantics Anonymous is a harmless way to spend an hour and a half. It is a French
romantic comedy about two socially inept people, one of whom, the lady, works
at a failing chocolate factory run by a man even more socially awkward than the
lady. Death at a Funeral is a British farce starring Matthew Macfadyen.
It has some hilarious moments, but not enough of them to warrant my
recommendation.
Bottom line: See Avanti! and the 2008 miniseries Sense and Sensibility.
