the more the merrier

The first time I had heard about this film was in Telluride, in '03. They were showing it several times as one of their classics, the same year Budd Schulberg was there. I was there as part of their student symposium, and the two prominent american scholars who ran our symposium, would literally wrap up our discussions, and run, really sprint for it, to the theatre where the film was showing.

I never saw it in the mountains, more interested in seeing the mountains then, but the film played at the edmonton film society last night and I stopped by. every monday the royal albeta museum, the soceity plays classics from the lost golden age of hollywood. the first screening I ever saw there was Douglas Sirk's "Written on the Wind." Magic. Almost everybody in the theatre had seen it already, knew when they were going to laugh, or weep. they had seen it first with dates, some still with their original sweethearts probably.

the film, to say the least, was a hoot. the acting by the mains weren't great, but that didn't matter, I guess. it was a classic, for reasons that classics just aren't made anymore. the film, the grandeur of details, situations, impossibilities, and imagination, hinged upon a direction and timing that today would be hokey and campy. Somewhere in the 70's, "realism" took over Hollywood. Some could pull it off. Cassavettes comes immediately to mind. But others continue to fail miserably. In Hollywood, realism just doesn't work. it's all a fairytale, a fairytale told in any other fashion, loses its flair, its mystique, that makes it special in the first place.