I’ve seen very few Hollywood films from before the late sixties because they’re almost always so unrealistic that I can’t get into them. But I just watched this because I see it mentioned at times and I can never remember whether The Night of the Hunter or The Night of the Iguana is the one I’ve seen. And now that I’ve seen both, I’ll remember which is which.
Did it boil down to “I don’t really buy any of this”? Yes.
Although it’s interesting in a way to see the stage where one era is starting to become another era. Where there’s some “hey, whatever gets you through the night” and a little bit of language—Sue Lyon saying bitch a couple of times, but the copy I saw went silent where Ava Gardner said ass—and the villain accused of being motivated by lesbianism (Were there hints of it in her behavior? I didn’t notice.)—but all totally drenched in Christianity so they could get into the American theaters of 1964.
Ava Gardner, her Wikipedia page images with an inch of makeup on make me think of someone playing a schoolteacher of the 1940s. Having seen her in a film now, what I couldn’t stop noticing 100% of the time was the smoker voice. She died from smoking. She…looks her age. Deborah Kerr was older but looked like she was holding up better. Although Kerr’s Wikipedia page primary photo is of her at 52ish where 52 is what she looks.
I skimmed a couple of reviews before watching this, and I think one said something about Gardner holding her chin up the whole time to avoid appearing jowly. So then I did notice her with her chin up all the time.
There was a fight in the middle that wasn’t intended to be realistic in the slightest, and so it just stuck out oddly.
I know nothing about acting, but I could see how Skip Ward would look wrong even in a still frame. I don’t know whether he didn’t know what angle to be at with respect to the camera or didn’t have the right kind of expressive face or body language or what. Beyond not being adept at delivering the questionable dialog of the era.
It’s hard to buy the idea that getting fired from a bus tour would be that horrifying of a development for Richard Burton. That he’d just get another job, and that if he was at the end of his rope, it wouldn’t necessarily be now because of this.
He has had terrible problems with getting chased by 16-year-old girls, but now he is like 40, so that particular problem can’t continue much longer unless his character becomes a movie star or rock star.
And it was undercut some by Ava Gardner saying he comes here twice a year when he’s in distress. But if he did have a history of showing up there, he wouldn’t have needed to be told initially that they’re closed because she’s always closed in August or whenever it was.
The theme of the nobility of keeping going is a bit undercut when, decades later, you can look at Wikipedia and see how lives turned out, chaos and woe, and what was it all for.
At least they only very occasionally brought in music to tell us what to feel. But if they could go 99% of the time without telling us what to feel, why didn’t they have the guts for that last percent?
At one point it was a commercial for smoking, and at the end it was a commercial for cola.
There was a bit with shaving. I swear every black-and-white movie has a guy shaving. Was it slightly intimate for the women watching, by the standards of the time, or was it always a razor commercial of sorts? I guess the former because who had beards then?
Oh, the walking on broken glass and acting as if he didn’t feel it, even if he had been drinking. As if.
If I had a background in literature or any sort of storytelling, it would be interesting to play “What would really happen?” I kind of think even a bunch of 1960s church biddies would be physical enough to get that distributor head back from Richard Burton. All of them and Skip Ward. Just get that bus going and be gone. Plus Burton would try harder to protest the reality of how Sue Lyon was chasing him, even if it might not have accomplished much to do so.
Did we get any good reason really for why Deborah Kerr was that much of a spinster?