Portrait of Jennie (1948)

This Italian poster for Portrait of Jennie is so much prettier than the U.S. poster. This movie is super weird – but then turns out to be a sort of typical romantic fantasy. It's interested in time and long life and haunting, like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir from the year before but without the humor and charm of the earlier film. Still, there's something that gets under your skin about Portrait of Jennie. And in many ways the film is this odd portrait of a sad young woman who never found what she was looking for. The more I think about it the more I like it.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

This version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is filmed like a horror movie for much of its running time. This makes the whole thing pretty great – much more interesting than a standard historical epic from this period in film history. Several other notable things: A young Edmond O'Brien is very very handsome in this. The 1996 animated feature clearly quotes the prayer sequence from this movie. And there is an amazing visual effect at the movie's end.

Little Sense

Tomorrow we are having a movie day in my class. I am showing the students The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch, the documentary about the theatre performer and playwright. I'm screening it because I am having them read Nicky Silver's Pterodactyls for Friday and I want to give them a notion of style. This way they can see some campy performance traditions and also learn about an important artist I don't have time to discuss properly in my class.

Today I rented the Max Reinhardt / William Dieterle film of A Midsummer Night's Dream from 1935 with Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney and James Cagney. But I found it, quite frankly, unwatchable. I shut it off after about an hour. I just couldn't handle it. It's a terrible, terrible film. It's drawn-out and overly long and there's lots of maniacal laughing that makes no sense. Cagney is funny as Bottom, but there is nothing else to recommend the movie and I couldn't bear it for more than an hour. You know how I feel about bad Shakespeare.

Speaking of bad Shakespeare. I had my first truly bad rehearsal of my own Midsummer production tonight. Of course both my roommates had to be in attendance. I am almost positive I can fix all of this evening's problems in the six rehearsals I have left before we open, but it was more than a tad embarrassing for them to come see a show this unpolished. Of course I start to wonder if I know what I'm doing at all, and worry if I really have enough ability to take a directing class with the professor here in the fall... and all other sort of ego-driven questions run through my brain. But a good shower and a Stella Artois (or two?) have cured me of that for now. And I will just worry about fixing the show.

Suprisingly Enough...

This evening I saw a very good production of (you'll never believe this) Spoon River Anthology. It was at Pomona College and runs through Sunday. I recommend it, especially if you've seen the show before and hated it.

I got a call from Linda today asking me questions about my show. It made me nervous. I can't even really remember what she needed to know, but this show does not feel very well planned-out. Audition times: that's what she wanted. Weird.

I got some free Tejava and V8 from one of the planes today. Hooray.

I have a lot more to tell you. I feel really on-edge and lazy lately. I feel like I haven't seen a lot of the people I love in a long time. I have also been listening to a lot of really old voices from my past lately and the whole effect is quite jarring.
PLUS I saw four movies this weekend and only one was good... this is normally okay, but the other three were really bad.

The Music Man was wonderful, of course. I absolutely loved it, Robert Preston, Jane Powell and all of its splendor.

Street Smart was AWFUL. God-awful. Terrible, movie-of-the-week level drama with Christopher Reeve in a completely unredeeming role, not that he was ever a good actor to begin with. Morgan Freeman plays against type as a pimp in this, and that's really why I saw it, but Street Smart is probably one of the most racist films I've ever seen in my life. It has no respect or empathy for the Black people in its urban settings and doesn't give a shit about any of them. I loathed this movie.

The Devil and Daniel Webster is a moralizing Faustian tale of bullshit set on a New Hampshire (I think) farm. It's a 1941 film from William Dieterle, whose direction is sturdy. The script is a load of crap, though, and most of the performances are pretty fucking dreary.

Last but not least, Good Bye Dragon Inn is a weird weird film. I just wish it had been more interesting. It's about the movies, I guess, but damn it's dry. The director (Lai Ming-Tsiang) has stuffed the film full of these two-minute still-life shots that don't seem to do anything at all. Strange. I kind of half-liked it, but I recommend it to no one at all.