Two more movies

We've watched a couple of old movies on DVD this last week: The Quiet American, and Billy Liar. I'm pretty sure I saw the second movie when it first came out, but it meant nothing to me when I saw it tonight, so perhaps I didn't.

The Quiet American has an immensely subtle performance from Michael Redgrave as a character we never really get to like much: he’s a whiner, and selfish, and uninvolved in what goes on around him. He has a sarcastic tongue (not entirely surprising, given that Audie Murphy, the American of the title, waltzes in and takes over Redgrave’s woman).

Audie Murphy is a bit flat in it, even some of the lines coming across as not being given much meaning.  It's an odd role anyway; he comes across, mostly, as a pretty good sort of fellow – though we never quite find out what it is he’s supposed to be doing to upset the Vietnamese so much, to the extent that they murder him. By all accounts, in the original Graham Greene book, he's a different kettle of fish, and the movie changed this and a number of other things. The dialogue in the movie is very good, courtesy Joseph Mankiewicz, but it's quite a static film in many ways, and full of mysteries that we never quite get to grips with. 

The other film, for me, hasn't fared too well over a period of time. One of the many naturalistic movies that came out in the sixties, such as Look Back in Anger and Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner, to name just two, it features an excellent cast, every one of whom is spot on...except Tom Courtenay. Courtenay's performance now seems very mannered, very over the top, especially since he's surrounded by a bunch of old actors (and some younger ones) who might well have stepped straight in off the streets of whatever unnamed Northern town they're supposed to inhabit. Certainly Billy is supposed to be a dreamer and a bit of a young man not really grown up, but apart from the brief moments when he angrily shoots people - in his imagination - his dreams are all too other-worldly to really be of use to him. And given the chance to go away with Julie Christie (you have to ask what she really sees in him and why she would want to marry him) he blows it at the last minute, and returns in preference to the safe world he's grown up in, where he can be angry at all the muttonheads around him while still dreaming his dreams - with himself at the centre. The ending is perhaps right for the character, and yet it's unsatisfying. He's such a selfish twerp you wonder why he doesn't actually take the chance to up and leave. 

Wilfred Pickles and Mona Washbourne are marvellous as his parents, Gwendolyn Watts and Helen Fraser are the two markedly different 'fiancees', and Leonard Rossiter and Rodney Bewes also appear. John Schlesinger was the director.

Re-reading

I remember reading quite some time back about a woman who decided not to buy or borrow any more new books until she'd read all the ones (the hundreds and hundreds of ones) she had in her house.  That was her project for the coming year.   I don't know how she got on, but I suspect she found it difficult to resist the temptation of new books.

I've gone through a funny patch in regard to reading: I've been reading a lot of kids' books this year, especially since I retired, but I've also found it quite difficult to get on and read a number of the books I've borrowed from the library, especially the fiction titles.  I've found it even harder to read some of the non-fiction ones I've picked up.   Must be a phase.

However, what I have done more of lately, is re-read books.  As I wrote in my last post, I've just finished reading a Dale Ralph Davis book for the third time.   But this month I've re-read three other books: William O'Malley's More Daily Prayers for Busy People (I'd re-read his Daily Prayers for Busy People earlier in the year - both of these must be up to their third or fourth readings in each case); Grahame Greene's Our Man in Havana which was a delight, full of wit and satire; and Steve Turner's Imagine, which is about art and Christianity. 

You'll note that only one of those is a fiction title, in spite of what I said in the paragraph before that.  I also re-read Philip Yancey's Prayer earlier in the year, and in September, Monday the Rabbi Took Off, and, Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red, both by Harry Kemelman.

Non-fiction books often need a couple of readings to get to grips with what the author is saying, or just to mull over again the points they're making.  In fact, continual re-readings over a period of years probably wouldn't do any harm.  And it's like catching up with an old friend over coffee and discovering what's been happening in the meantime. 

Fiction titles - if you leave them for a few years (and in the case of the three novels mentioned here, it's been quite a lot of years) - often appear completely new: you've forgotten how the story goes, though you have a vague familiarity with some of the incidents, and you find new things that you don't remember at all.  Plus you come at the story with a different life perspective.   Age has a few advantages...!

I find the same thing with watching a movie again: it's surprising how much you've forgotten or missed the first time around, and even though you think you know what's going to happen, there are always surprises.   One viewing is often insufficient for most movies (it's too much, of course, for a few!).  I noticed with the New Zealand movie, The Insatiable Moon, that I enjoyed it a great deal more the second time around, for instance.  You're no longer curious about where the story is going, and you can focus on other aspects of the movie.