Cinema Betty

This weekend was wonderful and terrible at Casa van Voorhees. Betty Debbie traveled from Seattle and we...um...upended the whole house in a quest for greatness as we painted and shifted three of the kids' bedrooms. We ended up collecting 22 bags of things and working ourselves to the bone.

But we had a little downtime and Betty Debbie showed me a wonderful, very Betty, Netflix find.

From Time to Time (2009):

A haunting ghost story spanning two worlds, two centuries apart. When 13 year old Tolly finds he can mysteriously travel between the two, he begins an adventure that unlocks family secrets laid buried for generations.(IMBD)

We've got trusted family retainers who say terribly frank things to cranky grande dames, stately homes in danger of being sold, an aga stove, toasting bread before the fire, offers of hot milk, a beloved granny, an old nursery...

It was practically perfect. The nicest bit was that I was able to watch it with my 13-year-old and when the granny comes onscreen, she perked up and said, "Oh! Maggie Smith!", which is sort of proof of being raised right, no?

No Betty Heroine Was Named 'Sabrina'

Although I do associate 'Tabitha' with 'Sabrina.'  Oh, I just realized why.

I watched the 1954 movie Sabrina quite recently, for the first time.  I of course adore Mr. Bogart, and Ms. Head, and the Watchacallit Estate setting was lovely.  However, as a romance, this story fell splat on its face for me.  Perhaps you have a different view.  If so, I'd love to read it.  Let me detail my confusions regarding how love came into the thing:

1)  Sabrina loves David, or thinks she does, and her friends in the servants' quarters seem to cheer her on.  Huh?  Everyone knows he's a worthless ne'er-do-well.  She rarely even talks to him, so her crush is based primarily on his looks and a rollerskating lesson ten years ago.  And then she heads off to Paris, spends two years meeting other people there, and her crush survives?  Why?  What?  How am I to sympathize with this woman?

She has friends, distractions, and he's a ninny.  Not getting over him isn't love, it's foolishness.

Lab rat, or possibly Laurens.

[Betty notes:  David is not even a registrar!  He is clearly Adam ter Brandt or Laurens van Amstel, and should be shipped to Pittsburgh, though the Larrabee family idea of Bozeman or Butte is worthwhile also. Further, Christina and Serena (Both rhyme with Sabrina.  Hmmm.) have psychologically-demonstrated reasons for maintaining their crushes with worthless n.d.w's long past the sensible expiration date.  If your w.n.d.w. is nearby, alternately criticizing and praising you, taking you to tea and standing you up, your crush may never die.  We get hooked harder by inconsistent reward than by reliable reward.  Try it with a rat and some food pellets and a little button sometime.]




2) David loves Sabrina, or claims he does.  This is based on seeing her in a seriously pencil-cut skirt suit with something perilously close to a turban on her head, and in an admittedly awesome ball gown, and dancing with her very briefly.  Even if he (thrice-married) acts on his infatuations in a manner detrimental to the marriage vow, she can't believe he loves her on the basis of two good outfits.  C'mon!

I think it actually is a turban.

Betty note:  I believe they don't ever actually kiss in the movie, though lots of stills where they seem to.

Prescribe Diazepam;
marry English girl;
finish Lancet article.

[Betty notes:  Sure, we sometimes fall in love at first sight, but if so we jot a reminder to marry her in our small leather notebook, or resolve to put him out of our minds unless that fiancée proves as poisonous as she looks.  We do not immediately announce our feelings to the object thereof and start planning an elopement, especially if one of us is engaged to be married already.  And yes, I know Betty believed in the power of a great outfit, but a true hero knows his beloved would look lovely in a potato sack.  This is worth bearing in mind.]

3)  Linus loves Sabrina, and she loves him.  This is based on his having been overworked for three decades, and her feeling cossetted by him as he deviously plots to detach her from his brother, and her mild pity for him, which is based on a complete lie he told as part of the devious plotting process.  I give them six weeks, tops.  Actually, since it's a little based on his being Humphrey Bogart, I give him six weeks, tops, while she moons around for years wondering what outfit will get him home earlier.

Swoon.

[Betty notes:  I do not see any helpful pointers in the oeuvre for this fantasy or incipient train wreck.  Or both.]

4)  The voiceover tells us the Larrabee parents married in 1906.  The movie was made in 1954.  So they've been married 48 years, and had two sons.  Assume it took them eight years to pop out the first; he's still forty.  The younger has been married three times, and single for several years, so I don't see how he can be much less than 35.  (William Holden was about 36 when they made the movie; Humphrey Bogart about 55.)  Sabrina is 20 when she returns from Paris.  ICK!!

Still rather swoony, actually, but I'm pushing 50.  Ms. Hepburn looks more doubtful.

ick

[Betty notes:  Mary Jane and Fabian are 22 and 40 during their Winter of Change, and they are the ickiest couple in the canon.  Heroes are typically about 12 years older than their [future] wives.]

Does this movie work as a romance for you?  Porquoi, as Sabrina would say?

Betty's World on BBC!

Probably many of you have, by now, read Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth, or seen the BBC series based on the book and two follow-ups.  Those of you who have not have the most marvelous summer treat in store!

Worth (1935-2011) wrote her memoirs in her 60s, and the first volume was published in 2002.  The BBC series began airing in early 2012.

The story is autobiographical, with most names changed to protect the privacy of people Worth hadn't kept in touch with in the 50 years since the story's setting.  And that setting?  It's Worth's foray into midwifery in the tough slums of London's East End in the 1950s and early 60s!  Yes!  This is Betty's world, replete with caps and cloaks, Cockney accents and bicycles.

The first book contains a lot less romance (the author fled a doomed love affair, in her mid-teens, to learn nursing in a West End hospital, and doesn't care to discuss it) and a whole lot more gynecological detail than a Betty novel.  There are also heartbreaking stories of poor people abandoned to horror by a system without safety nets.  Worth doesn't shrink from the sorrow and horror, but keeps a stiff upper lip and soldiers on, calling in the chiropodist to deal with toenails untrimmed for decades, befriending a young prostitute and trusting a mother of 25(!) to deal with a premature baby successfully.  There's also a skinnydipping interlude in literal Brighton, but other than constant babies, no mention of metaphorical Brighton.

I've only seen two episodes of the show, one from the middle and one toward the end, but I get the impression romance figures more largely in the film version than the printed.  And oh, the costumes!  The hairdos!  The meals!

Must dash to library and attempt to wrestle volumes two and three (Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to the East End) from what is most likely a long list of requestees.  So maybe the bookstore...

Enjoy!

Cinema Betty

I came across a fun little rom/com quite by accident.  I was idly browsing through Netflix Watch Instantly and recognized a familiar face:

David Tennant. My favorite doctor.

Being rather an avid Dr. Who fan, I just had to see what this was all about. 

Here's the Netflix blurb: When Hollywood actress Lara Tyler travels to a tiny Scottish island to get married, the paparazzi follow her, prompting her to flee in frustration. To dupe the press, her handlers stage fake nuptials and hire a local girl to play the bride.

The movie is unrated, which made me a little leery (rom/coms of today have such a tragic habit of going to Brighton), but after reading a bunch of the reviews I decided to give it a try. Wikipedia shared the info that parts of the movie were filmed on the Isle of Man...which was standing in for the fictional island Hegg...all of which reminded me of the Isle of Mull (Cassandra by Chance).

Verdict: It's adorable. Scottish accents galore, Scottish scenery, and it's really pretty clean! There is no nudity and no going to Brighton. If I had to guess at what American rating it would have, I would say PG (one bad word and a couple of brief references to sex).

Cinema Betty

via email:

Betty Debbie

I just finished watching "Carry On, Nurse"(released 1959) on TCM. I suspect the Great Betty would NOT be amused. But I laughed like a loon. I especially enjoyed the fact that I knew why the staff nurse and the sister had different colored uniforms, and different colored belts and they actually showed a sluice room!! Of course the plot is sillier than Our Betty ever allowed. And there are no RDDs. But still, a nice bit of mad-cap British comedy. And I think that Betty fans would enjoy it.
Barb

 
I found a clip on YouTube from Carry On, Nurse.  You're right, La Neels would never have used such frivolity in a hospital setting...but it is rather madcap and fun. Unfortunately it's not available on Netflix, so the rest of us might be out of luck.  I did find another British rom-com there called Nurse on Wheels... I'm not sure, but it looks like most (if not all) of it is on YouTube.
-Betty Debbie

Cinema Betty

The Fortunes of Francesca has a little to do with a 'Girl Friday':

His Girl Friday (1940)

Nothing with Rosalind Russell in it ever seems to date and you all know my unrequited passion for Cary Grant even when he, as in this, is playing a cad.  Hard-boiled newspaper reporting, hiding in a roll-top desk (the first time one of those was actually useful for something) and dialog that just zings along.  It goes slightly pear-shaped when I'm expected to swallow Earl Williams (the killer) character but the movie about a man on death row happens to have very little to do with it at all.

Here's a great take on the film while the reporter is supposed to be reviewing another film:
When the philosopher Stanley Cavell coined the term "comedy of remarriage" to name those classic screwball films in which a bickering couple must divorce before they can discover that they're actually made for each other, he didn't have in mind Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher What Happens in Vegas (newly on DVD!) isn't just one of the worst films of 2008, it's an insult to its venerable tradition. Praise be then to His Girl Friday (1940), which screens tomorrow at BAMCinematek, as part of its awesome Howard Hawks series. Cary Grant is his usual unflappable self as a newspaper editor whose ex-wife and former ace reporter (Rosalind Russell) is in town with her new fiance, Ralph Bellamy (whom you kids probably know as Randolph Duke in Trading Places). From their very first scene together, when Russell asks Grant for a smoke and he casually tosses a cigarette at her (they then repeat the pattern with the matches) we can see what they see in each other—and in contrast to the idiotic characters played by Diaz and Kutcher, they're not just beer goggling.


The  movie I want to recommend for The Final Touch has nothing to do with the book unless the virtue of portraying one of the hottest Dutchmen in cinema is in the RDD ballpark:

The Spanish Main (1945)

Laurent Van Horn (Paul Henreid), captain of a Dutch ship, is forced to dock at a Spanish port to make repairs to his vessel but is imprisoned by Don Alvarado (Walter Slezak), the Spanish governor, and sentenced to hang for trespassing. While awaiting execution, Laurent meets other unfairly incarcerated prisoners and together they stage a jail breakout, escaping to safety. Five years later, Laurent has become "The Barracuda," an infamous pirate who plunders Spanish ships. When he learns that Francesca (Maureen O'Hara), Don Alvarado's bride-to-be, is arriving by boat from Mexico to be married, he sets a trap, abducting her and setting in motion his revenge for the governor's past mistreatment of him.  
 Honestly, doesn't that just make your eyeballs scorch?
Henreid was personally responsible for that change of pace. He came up with the story line in an attempt to change his image. "The search for challenging movies that would change my image as an actor finally made me decide to write out a quick treatment of an idea that had been simmering in my mind for a long time. I was getting tired of being cast as the suave ladies' man...so I started to think in terms of something that would be more fun, a swashbuckling part in a pirate film."
I adore Paul Henreid (even though he's Austrian and not Dutch at all).  You should totally try to check this out.

Cinema Betty

Fate Takes a Hand has some mild home renovations which our heroine has to facilitate.  I love home renovation movies almost as much as I hate actual home renovation:

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)

If there is anything I love more than Cary Grant, it's probably Myrna Loy.
One review says, "The type of humor here is something that everyone can enjoy because, even if you haven’t built a house yourself, the emotional focus is on attempting something that seems to get more and more difficult as the days go by. We all have those goals in our lives – probably more than one – and we can all remember the feeling of seeing the end of a project on the horizon only to be told that a major complication will push everything back or not allow us to do things the way we want."  I spent forty minutes one day this week (on the nicest day in an age!) NOT driving my daughter to her softball practice.  We were like one of those Discovery Channel scare-the-suburbanites shows where a real-life couple take a shortcut through a snowy forest and, through a series of misadventures, wind up on the brink of death. I felt just like Mr. Blandings.


In The Doctor's Girl, Loveday and Charlie take a trip to Brighton which is a town that always struck me as giving off a kind of Atlantic City boardwalk-y vibe...which is just enough to recommend:

Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken (1991)

My blindness is no worse than your acting...

Yes.  The movie has flaws.  The title is about as awkward as a handlebar mustache during the soup course.  It tells the story of an obscure side-show act. No one acts very well in it. And yet...Gabrielle Anwar is engaging.  The story is a universal one of courage in the face of terrible odds.  And then there's Michael Schoeffling's turn as 'Al' the love interest--his acting is just rotten and not for nothing does his wiki page have an entire segment titled "Life After Sixteen Candles" (wherein he played desperately hot Jake Ryan) but he's one of those people who prove the saying, 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever' and expecting Jake Ryan to act is like asking the Venus de Milo to tap dance.  It's just not done.

*For Valentine's Day in 2004, twenty years after the film's American premiere, the Washington Post ran an article entitled "Real Men Can't Hold a Match to Jake Ryan of Sixteen Candles". On set Schoeffling used risers in his boots to appear taller than Ringwald and the other actresses in Sixteen Candles. Schoeffling stood 5'8" and several camera angles were used to give the appearance of a 6' tall jock. Schoeffling never duplicated the success of Sixteen Candles, and in various magazine and newspaper interviews stated the lack of roles and a growing family to feed were his reasons for retiring from acting. He now lives with his wife, Valerie L. Robinson of Virginia, also a former model, and their two teenage children Scarlet and Zane, in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, producing handcrafted furniture as the owner of a woodworking shop. 

Cinema Betty

The Little Dragon has a case of seriously hidden identity.  Our prince is pretending to be a pauper:

Coming to America (1988)

We're not rich.  We're wearing normal, common, everyday clothes...

Akeem Joffer, the prince and heir to the throne of the fictitious African country Zamunda, is discontented with being pampered all his life. The final straw comes when his parents, King Jaffe and Queen Aeoleon, present him with a bride-to-be he has never met before, trained to mindlessly obey his every command. Akeem concocts a plan to travel to America to find a wife he can both love and respect and who accepts him for himself, not his status. He and his friend, Semmi arrive in, New York City, because according to Akeem "What better place to find a queen than the city of Queens?" They rent an apartment in the neighborhood of Jamaica and begin working at a local restaurant called McDowell's (restaurateur Cleo McDowell's attempt to copy McDonald's), passing themselves off as foreign students...
*So this one is R-rated and I really don't recommend it in it's unedited form (Heck, I wouldn't even know what I was recommending!) but this shows up in endless cable programming often enough that I'll give it a pass and tell you to catch it there. 

Hilltop Tryst has several visits to grand hotels.  Betty Debbie remembered with fondness a movie with a last, desperate trip to one such:

Last Holiday(2006)

Beatrice may not have a fatal disease but if you substitute the dreaded Colin...
Gosh, I love Queen Latifah.  Gosh, I love LL Cool J.
Robert Ebert wrote: The movie "takes advantage of the great good nature and warmth of Queen Latifah, and uses it to transform a creaky old formula into a comedy that is just plain lovable. To describe the plot is to miss the point, because this plot could have been made into countless movies not as funny and charming as this one ... All depends on the Queen, who has been known to go over the top on occasion, but in this film finds all the right notes and dances to them delightfully. It is good to attend to important cinema like Syriana and Munich, but on occasion we must be open to movies that have more modest ambitions: They only want to amuse us, warm us, and make us feel good. Last Holiday plays like a hug.
That's just how I feel about Betty Neels books.

Cinema Betty

An Independent Woman has three sisters embarking on marriage and Betty Debbie begs me to recommend:

Hobson's Choice (1954)

Charles Laughton plays Henry Hobson, the tyrannical father of three sisters.  He schemes to keep the eldest single and instead becomes ruined (and saved again). 
The phrase is a Britishism: A Hobson's choice is a free choice in which only one option is offered. As a person may refuse to take that option, the choice is therefore between taking the option or not; "take it or leave it". The phrase is said to originate with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery stable owner in Cambridge, England. To rotate the use of his horses, he offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in the stall nearest the door or taking none at all.

A Summer Idyll has a knife fight.  Think we can't find a romantic movie with a knife fight?  Think again:

Crocodile Dundee (1986)

'That's not a knife.  That's a knife!'

Cinema Betty

Nanny By Chance is about someone who never intended being the caretaker of young children:

Father Goose(1964)

Finally, the nanny was behaving like a normal girl...

 I love Cary Grant, I just love him and I have a congenital weakness for a schlubby fix-er-upper kind of man (Peter Ustinov, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum (sometimes)...).  Here, Grant is at his schlubbiest and the hot, French schoolmistress that lands on his deserted island in the middle of WWII with her rag-tag international students is initially prim but finally more than a match for him.

Once For All Time does not by any measure feature a physicist brother living in Canada but that's not going to stop me:

I.Q. (1994)

I don't remember this movie very well but I do remember liking it a bit.  Meg Ryan has hair to kill for in it.
The tag line is 'With Einstein as Cupid what could possibly go wrong?' and that's how I imagine the slick, power-suited cinema pitch-man selling it to the producers...

Cinema Betty

The Right Kind of Girl has a dying mother.  Well, then, I have a million Disney/Pixar movies to choose from:

Finding Nemo (2003)

Unlike The Right Kind of Girl, this film has an awesome and involved father but nothing says pulmonary embolism to me quite like a horrific barracuda attack...(So sudden!  So deadly...)  Mama Clown Fish is carried away (enjoyed for dinner) and the little tyke with the gimpy fin (Oh why didn't I do this for Esmeralda?!) must make his way without her.  If, in the world of Nemo 'all drains lead to the ocean', then in the world of Neels, 'all death leads to an RBD'...


A Good Wife has a deathbed promise that ought to be disregarded.  My pick this week has one that was:

Sense and Sensibility (2008)

There are a lot of versions to pick from and while I love the Emma Thompson one, I can hardly stand Kate Winslet as Marianne for love or money (She does a good job being annoyingly stupid but does such a good job of it that I want to drop her down a well...but I always have a hard time stomaching that character, I confess)--though I adore Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon with a scorching desert heat.  But this isn't about that one.  The 2008 mini series is a gem (though it begins rather racily) with a cast that so totally retreats into their characters that I am never tempted to say 'Oh there's so-and-so being a very good such-and-such'.  It ultimately triumphs for me because the Marianne/Colonel/Rake triangle is carried off so well.

Cinema Betty

Off With the Old Love has a lot of ill-conceived romantic engineering.  Hark!  Ahoy there off the poop deck:

Emma (1996)

I am not a massive Gwyneth Paltrow fan (I don't dislike her or anything but she reminds me of a poor man's Grace Kelly--only instead of leaving her homeland to marry a fabulously wealthy, if chinless, prince of a minor principality, she hitched herself to the lead singer of Coldplay and gave her kids amusing, if ultimately I-Am-A-Child-of-a-Celebrity-shouting, names.) but I feel her accent in this almost entirely redeems what Hugh Laurie calls the 'Act of war' that was Dick Van Dyke's turn as Bert  in Mary Poppins.
But let me tell you, I would walk a mile to see any movie with Jeremy Northam in it...

Esmeralda is about an heiress with a disability:

Penelope (2006)

Hello, gorgeous.

I discovered this movie a few years ago and lent it out to a friend a few months later.  She has never returned it and now it just seems silly not to have mentioned it.  Shrug.  I can get it off Netflix whenever I need it.
Forlorn heiress Penelope Wilhern (Christina Ricci) is cursed, and the only way out is to fall in love with someone of suitable stock. But how can she find her soul mate when she's sequestered inside her family's estate with only her parents (Catherine O'Hara and Richard E. Grant) to keep her company? Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon co-produced this untraditional fairy tale about a girl who bucks convention to create her own happy ending.
Oh...and did I mention it has James McAvoy in it?  (Squee!)

Cinema Betty

A Matter of Chance has the Dutch Resistance and concentration camps.  That reminds me of one of my favorite WWII movies:

The Great Escape (1963)

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes...

I sure do love me some Steve McQueen and my love of James Garner is boundless (boundless, I say!).  Everyone is such fun to watch in this true (well, mostly true) story of international cooperation and plucky invention. Yes, there's tragedy but there's also the triumph of human will and enormous good humor. 

A Suitable Match the principles twice (!) go out for a walk to the windwill in:

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)

'Parts of it are quite bizarre.  Some of it's quite fun!  It's too long,' says Betty Debbie.

Cinema Betty

A Dream Came True has a whole lotta Shakespeare.  So happens that so does:

Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

'Denzel!!'

I was probably just barely old enough to have my driver's license in high school when I dragged my non-literary friend into the wilds of Eugene to park my 15-passenger van outside a movie house on the edge of the University of Oregon called the Bijou, where the seats were hard and scary, the prices low and the movies arty. 
Sure, it opens with unnecessary nudity.  Sure, Keanu Reeves is working his tail off to keep up with the serious actors (but he's so nice to look at and I don't think Denzel's acting in this was any better).  Sure, Kenneth and Emma are no longer keeping company. 
I loved every second of it.

At the End of the Day has a couple of older protagonists which is nice because, as my mother would say (and has said), 'It never dies.' Betty Debbie recommended:

Sabah (2005)

The plot sounds a little like ( which you should also see) My Big, Fat Greek Wedding (aging single gal, hemmed in by tradition and family, finds love with someone decidedly outside the acceptable mold) but with Syrians. Betty Debbie also warns that they do visit Brighton, but discretely, and that it is a gentle and sweet little love story.

Cinema Betty

The Awakened Heart's most overlooked character is that of the jerk who dumped a young and naive 19-year-old Sophie, 8 looooong years ago.  In the great tradition of movies about men that are scum, I offer:

A Place in the Sun (1951)

'When that RDD comes along, I'm going to have an awful time forgetting what you look like...'

Montgomery Clift stars as George Eastman, a handsome and charming but basically aimless young man who goes to work in a factory run by a distant, wealthy relative. Feeling lonely one evening, he has a brief rendezvous with assembly-line worker Alice 'Al' Tripp, but he forgets all about her when he falls for dazzling socialite Angela Vickers. Alice can't forget about him, though: she is pregnant with his child.  Her mysterious death seems awfully convenient. 
The thing that kills me about this movie is how sneaky it is.  You just ache for George to shake himself off from that frowzy tart Alice and to have a happily ever after with a Elizabeth Taylor (Angela), beckoning with youth and dripping with money.  (I'm rooting for the wrong thing!) I have to wonder if Angela will swear off men for the next decade or so...

Not Once but Twice: Our heroine is in love with the younger brother...or thinks she is - then ends up with the richer older brother. I'm on it:

Sabrina (1954)

I'll catch you in the third act.

Betty Debbie says: 'I'm not sure which version to recommend - I obviously prefer Audrey Hepburn, I just wish she had Harrison Ford to end up with instead of Humphrey Bogart (Bogart + Kathrine Hepburn = cinema genius, Bogart + Audrey Hepburn = eww (your mileage may vary)). William Holden is mighty fine, but Greg Kinnear does a pretty credible job too.  Go with the 1954 version - just imagine a different leading man.'
Betty Keira says: 'You all know I have a thing about Audrey Hepburn so my calculus would ax her and keep Bogart...'

Cinema Betty

No Need to Say Goodbye has a plot that relies heavily on our heroine believing that our hero finds her little sister attractive.  Oh, I've got that one:

The Major and the Minor (1942)

I vant to be alone...

I really love this movie.  Ginger Rogers is so adorable as the hard-up and out-of-luck small town girl fleeing the big, bad city.  What a shame her funds are so low that she can only afford a children's fare back to her home.  (So, back goes the hat, off scrubs the make-up, off go the nylons...) Ray Milland is enchanted by her flopsy-mopsy charade and invites her to his military boarding school for a brief interlude where little Su-Su is very, VERY popular with handsy cadets anxious to try out their inventive but tedious Little Maginot Line line.  Here's a taste:
Cadet Clifford Osborne: Well, the bus is here. The zombies have arrived.
Susan Applegate: Who?
Cadet Clifford Osborne: [disdainfully] The girls from Miss Shackleford's school.
Cadet Lt. Miller: We use 'em for women.

Never the Time and the Place has an actual bona fide white-ish wedding. I love weddings and I love movies with weddings in them and one of my all-time favorites is:

The Wedding Singer (1998)

Julia suddenly realized that an eternity spent with a man who hogged the window seat was untenable.

In 1985, Robbie Hart is a wedding singer from New Jersey. He is engaged to his long-time girlfriend, Linda, who was attracted to him at a time when he dreamed of becoming a rock star. He meets and befriends a waitress, Julia Sullivan, at the reception hall where he regularly performs. Julia is also engaged, to businessman Glenn Gulia.
 It spirals out of control swimmingly, not least when Julia realizes her married name will be Julia Gulia.

Cinema Betty

Never Say Goodbye is all about communism (no it's not, more's the pity).  But is has some characters hoping to break free of Communist Russia or it's numerous satellites.  Have I got a favorite movie about that? Easy-peasy:

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Watch out, Sam!

The year is 1984. Ramius receives orders to take the boat to sea for exercises with the submarine V.K. Konovalov, commanded by his former student Captain Tupolev. Ramius murders political officer Ivan Putin, the one man not under his command and the only man aboard besides himself who knows the sub's orders, then burns the orders and tells the crew they will conduct nuclear missile drills off America's east coast.
Where to begin?  Grizzled and ruthless Sean Connery?  Hot (but not as hot as his future more corpulent self  (This is Betty Keira here.  Just go with it.)) Alec Baldwin?  Sam Neill being mortally wounded when his only wish in life was to have a fat American wife and go RVing in Montana...Montana!?  Saboteur cook and possible KGB agent who bears a disturbing resemblance to harry-er Vladimir Putin?

Never Too Late has a side plot about separated lovers who reunite after a years-long absence.  Only one film could fill this bill.  Though there are several versions to choose from my favorite is:

Persuasion (1995)

Ciarán Hinds...mmmm, mmmmm, good.

There is a newer version that has some serious eye candy as Captain Wentworth but the attractiveness disparity between the principle characters is a gulf too far to cross and all the snotty lines said by other characters are folded into his speeches (for expediency) and I just don't like him.  This version (despite the scene when Louisa injures herself which is laughably hilarious) threads the needle handily.

Cinema Betty

The Daughter of the Manor has a heroine with the last name of Crosby.  Hmmm.  Let's see what we can do with that:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949)

His name is Hank, sire.  Do we have any skinny blonde tartlets he can carry back to America?

Hank the American (!) hits his head and goes back in time.  Unfortunately, the heroic Hank also incurs the hatred of both Merlin and Morgan Le Fay. While Hank persuades King Arthur, a semi-perpetual, cold-in-the-nose invalid, to tour his kingdom in disguise to see the true, wretched condition of his subjects, Merlin and Morgan plot to usurp his throne. When Hank tries to stop them, he is returned to his own time.
I am torn between seeing Merlin and Morgan as the dual nature of Tony the Snake and identifying them with Leonora's horribly inattentive/evil parents...

Betty Debbie had very strong feelings about the pick for A Kind of Magic by reason of the Grade-A old folks: 

Cold Comfort Farm (1995)

Rufus Sewell is my favorite.

Having been orphaned, Flora Poste begins to look for relatives with whom to live. She settles upon the Starkadders, relatives on her mother's side, who live on the isolated Cold Comfort Farm.
Each of the extended family has some longstanding emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear; and the farm is badly run -- supposedly cursed -- and presided over by the unseen presence of Aunt Ada Doom, who is said to be mad through having seen "something nasty in the woodshed" as a child.
It's in my Netflix queue.

Cinema Betty

Love Can Wait had a passel of relations scattered about England.  Dr. James Tait-Bouverie had an embarrassment of aunts--ranging to irascible but tolerable to patronizing and intolerable. To that end, I recommend:

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Kate needs a job but, for heavens sake, don't offer her any elderberry wine!

Mortimer (Cary Grant) finds a corpse hidden in a window seat and assumes that Teddy has committed murder under some delusion, but his aunts explain that they are responsible ("It's one of our charities"). They have developed what Mortimer calls the "very bad habit" of ending the presumed suffering of lonely old bachelors by serving them elderberry wine spiked with arsenic, strychnine and "just a pinch of cyanide". The bodies are buried in the basement by Teddy, who believes he is digging locks for the Panama Canal and burying yellow fever victims.


At Odds With Love features a horrid hospital in the back-of-beyond.  What says chancy medical service like:

The Disorderly Orderly (1964)

An orderly has "neurotic identification empathy" - a psychosomatic problem that causes him to suffer the symptoms of others and interferes with his ability to function effectively on the job. 

It's a Jerry Lewis vehicle so I assume you know what you're in for.  I rather like him, myself (I get wobbly when a man puts on a pinky ring), so don't find the slapstick terrible.  I warn you, though, that a reviewer said of it, "[The film] runs dry at the end of the first third — like a juiceless watermelon — and splits open, with about the same results."

Cinema Betty

In Stars Through the Mist, we meet Deborah as she is wearing a surgical mask and another hidden mask over her real self.  Which brings me to:

Roman Holiday (1953)

Ann is a royal princess of an unspecified country (so much more tidy than having actual subjects!) who chafes from her rigid life.  Upon her escape she meets Joe the reporter, falls in love with him and must, in the end, renounce him.  (The same year, Princess Margaret was proposed to by Group Captain Townsend--two years later it was to end in public renunciation.  Eek.  Holy, drama, Batman.)

It's not my favorite movie.  (Though, when I told Betty Debbie this was my choice she said, 'Oh I love that movie.')  Peck I enjoy (in a boat, with a goat, in the rain, on a train, here or there, anywhere...) but I'm not an enormous Hepburn fan--like Cary Grant she played a lot of the same character over and over and either you liked it or you didn't--I don't mind it usually but the story is terribly sad.  I'm always wanting to shout into the screen, 'It's Gregory Peck!  Grab him and run for the hills!'

A Star Looks Down.  Betty Debbie suggested that I find something with a boat rescue because at the end of the book the Dreaded Dirk nearly maroons them.  Will do:

Lifeboat (1944)

"Hitchcock's inventiveness extended to the problem of how to justify a cameo appearance on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean."

When an Allied boat goes down mid-ocean, the survivors pull a German aboard and proceed to squabble over whether or not to drown him outright. I love any movie where Tallulah Bankhead goes slumming.