cimorene

This is probably a well-known fact to many people - that Michael Redgrave is great, I mean - but I am not a huge tv and movie fan, and not British, and only 41 years old, which means his greatest movies were filmed before my parents were born. I recognize Vanessa Redgrave, who must be his daughter, but she's been already old my entire life, and I have only seen her in a few roles that I can recall (I guess because Helen Mirren and Judi Dench and Maggie Smith have accounted for all the roles for women in her age range and didn't leave any for anyone else).

Anyway, I've been watching old movies pretty much at random for a while - or at least starting them at random; I'm only finishing like one in eight or something - and I stumbled onto The Browning Version (1951), a classic film of a classic play by the celebrated playwright Terence Rattigan. (Beautifully shot and directed too, even though it was mostly filmed at a studio.)

I've been mulling over this film on and off for a few weeks, because I can't recommend it unstintingly - it has Gender Issues - but they are far from simple or one-sided gender issues. There's a lot that you could say about them in multiple directions. It's not a case of a woman character villified exclusively by Gender Writing or by the sexist society around her. She's unambiguously a bad person deliberately choosing ~~violence~~ petty cruelty. But at the same time, she is a bit trapped, because she cares about keeping up appearances in that section of society which we see was so strongly anti-divorce in midcentury Britain and America. I think ultimately the film implies there is a kernel of truth to the idea that only finding out her husband was ace after their marriage when it was too late was her villain origin story, even though there's no excuse for turning into a villain. It feels like what is being suggested is a tragic incompatibility that they tragically couldn't have avoided because they were both too ignorant to be open with each other until it was too late. That's all very well, but her character lines up with stereotypical femmes fatales a bit too well - which coming from an accomplished and cerebral playwright is not accidental; she's an examination of the type in a way, and sure, but - some of the stereotypical beats are just too expected and therefore too thin, for me, to sit right. I see from Wikipedia that this was filmed again in the 90s and the gender issues were somewhat changed - I'm not sure if 'fixed' is the word -, but I'm not sure if I want to watch it. My childhood was in the 90s and I find 90s cringe more difficult to overcome than most other decades'.

But anyway, in spite of having the Genders, this movie was very good, and I can't put that all onto Michael Redgrave in the lead - there are three other significant performances (Jean Kent, Nigel Patrick, and a child actor) and the writing of a celebrated playwright, who did the adaptation himself. But Redgrave's performance was really what got me excited about watching. It was just SO GOOD.

I tried to find some of his other work, but so far I haven't hit on one that I managed to stick out for more than twenty minutes or so. It's funny to think about what absolutely terrible nonsense I watched for the sake of actors' back catalogues 10-20 years ago (Willem Dafoe, Norman Reedus, Gary Oldman, Liev Schreiber). You'd think my attention span had changed, but it's rather that I have more of a sense that I have other, better things to do than watch something bad nowadays.