I think it shows they work as characters, despite his best attempts to make them chess-pieces.
And that thinking of them as chess-pieces, he didn't always understand what made them tick. Bill Walker and Barbara have the best chemistry in Major Barbara because they have the best argument—the others are Socratic dialogues with better feed lines, but the two of them are really wrestling with the questions. I saw a stage production of Major Barbara about eight years before I discovered the film and the only part of it that I can remember are their scenes (The actor playing Peter Shirley watched their first round seated comfortable with his bread and scrape and sky-blue and heckled Bill from the peanut gallery: "He'll convert your head into a mashed potato!") I should like the original ending of Pygmalion better because it eschews romance, but I prefer the revised ending because it underscores how all the time Higgins has been sculpting his duchess out of a squashed cabbage leaf, he's failed to notice the equivalent process knocking him into something approaching a human being. (The 1938 Pygmalion actually ruined me for My Fair Lady, because Leslie Howard is a far more credible disaster weirdo than Rex Harrison, who could do charismatically rude, but not ferally unsocialized, which turns out to be what makes the difference in sympathy between the two versions for me. Howard's Higgins is capable of being a colossal dick, but he also visibly maxed out his social skills while still in school and has been making up for it by being the smartest person in the room ever since. He is not the smartest person in the room when Eliza is also in it.) Shaw's writing on his own plays is like reading criticism from Mars.
I suspect was due to somebody looking at Hatter’s Castle and deciding not to put Newton in a red wig again
I don't think I've ever seen him with anyone's hair but his own. It's quite good hair. It works for him!
she’s suffering burnout after losing her latest epidemic-patient and he’s trying to console her— it’s sort of automatic on his part, and he almost immediately steps back and apologizes. She looks at him curiously and confides that she’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man: “I didn’t think I’d like it at all. But this was something quite different.”
That sounds unexpectedly lovely.
. . . If this link works for you, I'm just going to leave this channel here. It is not a complete filmography, and it has a terrible-quality version of something I need to be able to link a good version of, but I've been looking for They Flew Alone (1942) for years.
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Date: 2024-03-02 03:45 pm (UTC)From:And that thinking of them as chess-pieces, he didn't always understand what made them tick. Bill Walker and Barbara have the best chemistry in Major Barbara because they have the best argument—the others are Socratic dialogues with better feed lines, but the two of them are really wrestling with the questions. I saw a stage production of Major Barbara about eight years before I discovered the film and the only part of it that I can remember are their scenes (The actor playing Peter Shirley watched their first round seated comfortable with his bread and scrape and sky-blue and heckled Bill from the peanut gallery: "He'll convert your head into a mashed potato!") I should like the original ending of Pygmalion better because it eschews romance, but I prefer the revised ending because it underscores how all the time Higgins has been sculpting his duchess out of a squashed cabbage leaf, he's failed to notice the equivalent process knocking him into something approaching a human being. (The 1938 Pygmalion actually ruined me for My Fair Lady, because Leslie Howard is a far more credible disaster weirdo than Rex Harrison, who could do charismatically rude, but not ferally unsocialized, which turns out to be what makes the difference in sympathy between the two versions for me. Howard's Higgins is capable of being a colossal dick, but he also visibly maxed out his social skills while still in school and has been making up for it by being the smartest person in the room ever since. He is not the smartest person in the room when Eliza is also in it.) Shaw's writing on his own plays is like reading criticism from Mars.
I suspect was due to somebody looking at Hatter’s Castle and deciding not to put Newton in a red wig again
I don't think I've ever seen him with anyone's hair but his own. It's quite good hair. It works for him!
she’s suffering burnout after losing her latest epidemic-patient and he’s trying to console her— it’s sort of automatic on his part, and he almost immediately steps back and apologizes. She looks at him curiously and confides that she’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man: “I didn’t think I’d like it at all. But this was something quite different.”
That sounds unexpectedly lovely.
. . . If this link works for you, I'm just going to leave this channel here. It is not a complete filmography, and it has a terrible-quality version of something I need to be able to link a good version of, but I've been looking for They Flew Alone (1942) for years.