We Are Quite, Quite Wrong
Blithe Spirit (1945)
directed by David Lean
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
watched on Netflix Instant
I didn't renege on my recent vow to not watch adaptations of plays, because I've always been curious about Blithe Spirit vis-à-vis the adaptation of Noël Coward's Design for Living. I "admire" Brief Encounter as much as the next Criterion fan, but I'm no Anglophile. Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter were released the same year, both directed by David Lean and written by Coward.
Who wouldn't choose Ernst Lubitsch and Ben Hecht if the chips were down? Such happy abandon in their redesigned Design for Living, such warmth - so far from parlor tricks like "wit" and "repartee." And Design for Living was old by 1945: Fredric March nearly fifty, Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins getting there. What can these new ghosts say about ménage à trois, or love, or life? Can they be anything but sad?
No. In Blithe Spirit, they cut, they deconstruct, they sigh. The men they haunt take tea and joke about the help. The men are rich, the ghosts were once rich, but Hecht made the lovebirds in Design for Living poor. Poor and full of life - open and self-effacing in place of "roguish flippancy." At least the three principals in both films are roughly the same age, relative to each other.
Ronald Neame was Lean's cinematographer, and together they show what Technicolor will do even to something so drab as a stage. A flickering candle casts stranger shadows on the wall. The wall looks like the sea, and the breeze that blows gives a painted dress an otherworldly quality. The camera is itself a spirit, unseen as it passes by mirrors, unmoored in claustrophobic little rooms.
directed by David Lean
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
watched on Netflix Instant
I didn't renege on my recent vow to not watch adaptations of plays, because I've always been curious about Blithe Spirit vis-à-vis the adaptation of Noël Coward's Design for Living. I "admire" Brief Encounter as much as the next Criterion fan, but I'm no Anglophile. Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter were released the same year, both directed by David Lean and written by Coward.
Who wouldn't choose Ernst Lubitsch and Ben Hecht if the chips were down? Such happy abandon in their redesigned Design for Living, such warmth - so far from parlor tricks like "wit" and "repartee." And Design for Living was old by 1945: Fredric March nearly fifty, Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins getting there. What can these new ghosts say about ménage à trois, or love, or life? Can they be anything but sad?
No. In Blithe Spirit, they cut, they deconstruct, they sigh. The men they haunt take tea and joke about the help. The men are rich, the ghosts were once rich, but Hecht made the lovebirds in Design for Living poor. Poor and full of life - open and self-effacing in place of "roguish flippancy." At least the three principals in both films are roughly the same age, relative to each other.
Ronald Neame was Lean's cinematographer, and together they show what Technicolor will do even to something so drab as a stage. A flickering candle casts stranger shadows on the wall. The wall looks like the sea, and the breeze that blows gives a painted dress an otherworldly quality. The camera is itself a spirit, unseen as it passes by mirrors, unmoored in claustrophobic little rooms.
posted by NPK at 8:55 PM
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