Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois (1951 Kazan/Williams Streetcar Named Desire)
Dear friends and readers,
Another announcement of a publication. (Rest assured very soon this will stop and I will return to our regularly scheduled programming mostly about films and books.) I’m happy to say my review of Nora Gilbert’s Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films and the Benefits of Censorship is now published on-line in Cercles: Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone
Better Left Unsaid, reviewed by Ellen Moody
Those who read this blog more than occasionally may recognize a few of the films I’ve written blog reviews of: Preston Sturges’s Miracle of Morgan’s Street, Cukor’s Philadelphia Story and Gaslight, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve been enjoying myself mightily watching (and re-watching) a selection of the films covered by this book and also reading for the first time (Thackeray’s Catherine: A Story) and rereading (Bronte’s Villette) a selection of its Victorian novels, not to omit material on actresses and other people centrally involved in film-making.
The book is significant because aspects of its thesis, its assumptions may be found in many recent and older publications. Perhaps among the more interesting of the secondary books I read was the collection by Kucich and Sadoff called Victorian Afterlife (about historical fiction too), and some of the individual screenplays and books on these films; also James Chandler’s The Archeaology of Sympathy comparing 18th century sentimental novels with (among other film-makers) Capra.
I would not have thought comparable Austen’s Mansfield Park with Cukor’s Gaslight:
Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist readying herself virtuously for bed (1944 Cukor/John Van Druten Gaslight).
I also liked following trails away from the main movies and books under consideration; one of these I’ve seen before included a commentary on the famous scene between Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront where in the make-believe cab seat we and Charlie Malloy (Steiger) are made to feel Charlie’s terrible betrayal of Terry Malloy (Brando)
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(Kazan/Schulberg, 1954 On the Waterfront)
I wish I had made more time to develop separate blogs on these books and films but do urge my readers to read and to watch or re-watch these books & films.
See some Christmas commentary coming out of It’s a Wonderful Life this year – Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey pleading with the inexorable banker to give him more time (it’s the banker who has been able to steal the money George had been saving to pay his debt).
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Many to Ellen thanks for the link to the essay by Chris Hedges, which was very interesting.
http://www.nationofchange.org/2014/12/24/wonderful-life-comrade//
By serendipity, I’d just watched ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ again and had been thinking over the politics of it – and also how very close it is to ‘A Christmas Carol’ in so many ways.
Judy
Me: Gilbert refers to a lot of film literature which suggests the closeness of It’s a Wonderful Life_ to a Christmas Carol. As so inundated by US propaganda against any pro-social thought (and Gilbert’s book is deeply conservative), these studies will neglect to point out how critical of the capitalist establishment is Dickens’s story as is Capra’s film. After all George Bailey does not head a bank but a building association, which is organized far more like a Friendly Society in the UK which used to help people buy homes for themselves.
Ellen
Diane: I also read the piece on Wonderful Life. I’ve liked that movie since it was released from its legal prison in the 1980s, but have always–from the start– noted the severe negative reaction to it and all the attempts to smear it and denigrate it as sentimental or what have you. A film like that, so effective in portraying the power of people to work together, clearly strikes terror into the heart of a certain group. This says to me that art is effective, art can bring changes. I find it sad that any kind of community, any depiction of people working together–and in this case, asking the government for nothing (!)–can be labelled communism.