The Talkies/A Room with a View
Johnston, George Sim
........................................................................................................................................................................... THE TALKIES A ROOM WITH...
...POLITIQUE INTERNATIONALS THE COLONEL'S COMEDIANS by Taki If you think comedy is dead, you should have been in Europe the week following the Libyan raid by Uncle Sam's air force...
...Until then, the audience is alternately amused and bored but never drawn into the story...
...Ivory did not mean them to laugh...
...No mention was made of the way Libyan authorities monitored and censored TV film, nor were the viewers made aware of the tight control imposed on journalists in Tripoli...
...The soul of a movie must be made of celluloid and not paper and ink...
...and Maggie Smith stops being merely fussy...
...Mind you, she's nothing of the kind...
...Greece, as usual, led the way...
...The scene is both touching and hilarious and brings us closer not only to these three characters, but also to Lucy and her priggish fiance, Cecil Vyse, who happen upon the scene...
...If Forster had had his druthers, the story would have ended with the Reverend Beebe running off with Cecil Vyse...
...It was Greece that provided safe haven...
...Forster had a hopelessly split personality as a writer...
...The confrontation is somewhat forced in the book...
...The turning point is the famous skinny dipping scene where the Reverend Beebe, George Emerson (who met and kissed Lucy in Italy), and Lucy's brother frolic naked-and full frontal, at that—in the forest...
...In Italy, Forster meant to ex-pose the priggishness and inadequacy of the English middle class under the blazing light of Mediterranean culture (conveniently shorn of Catholicism...
...A crude piece of writing like The World According to Carp has a fighting chance in Hollywood, especially with a director like George Roy Hill, while The Great Gatsby has gone down to defeat at least twice (I have not seen the silent version, but do not have my hopes up...
...To order by mail, clip this ad and send with your name and address, and a check or money order — or charge to your credit card (VISA, MasterCard,AmEx, Diners) by enclosing card number, expiration date,' and your signature...
...The flim-flam man himself, Andreas Papadoc, was the first prime minister outside the Arab world to congratulate Qaddafi for surviving the raid...
...George and Lucy have eloped to Florence and are back in the Room pawing each other and not paying much attention to the view...
...The big screen cannot convey what is important in a novel, anyway, since it is not so much what the characters say and do as the envelope of prose around them which make it worth reading...
...Simply follow the spoken and written instructions, listening and repeating...
...Quite the opposite...
...A modern Trojan Horse was constructed and sent into every American living room...
...The Ivory team has wisely jettisoned most of the homosexual polemics (but not the intriguing homosexual undercurrents in some of the characters) and kept the charming, if slight, love story intact...
...But such are the demands of the medium...
...Of course, we know that George will win...
...Ivory has delicately kept intact, of making Cecil quite sympathetic once Lucy has dumped him...
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...The film certainly takes its time getting off the ground, though...
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...and 290-p...
...But the working out of the tale is full of pleasures, and Forster added the nicetouch, which Mr...
...text, $159...
...She and John Mortimer are the best current practitioners of the "Masterpiece Theater" school of screen-writing...
...Waugh himself recognized this as he wrangled with MGM over the film rights in 1947...
...As it is, we are left with an unfair impression of the spinster...
...Left on the outside, What sort of people need to learn a ' '' 'I foreign language as quickly and effectively as possible...
...Helena Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith, as Lucy Honeychurch and her spinster guardian-cousin, begin so stiffly that we do not enter their characters at all...
...By the end of the course, you'll be learning and speaking entirely in French...
...How do you get the endless ramifications of a single James sentence on celluloid...
...And for a film-maker it has the added virtue that the "story" can be safely extricated from the "idea" behind it without losing anything essential...
...Now, James's novels, if you exclude his early simple efforts like Washington Square (which was once made into a rather decent film with Montgomery Clift) are hopeless movie fare...
...It came in the form of a 60-second television commercial using the actor E. G. Marshall...
...The U.S...
...E. M. Forster's A Room with a View is a much smaller affair than The Bostonians...
...Now the movie finally comes to life...
...But back to high comedy...
...On the other hand, he was a homosexual pantheist who detested northern Protestant civilization and worshiped the pagan Mediterranean (or his selective version of it...
...Personally, I would give Marshall an Oscar for his performance, because as everyone including the last bearded thug in Beirut knows, Athens is a "safe" haven for terrorists as long as they shoot Yankees but leave citizens of the Republic of Grease minding their olives...
...For the longest while, I wondered what Miss Carter, who has lips like overripe fruit and gives the impression that she is wearing a tight pair of jeans beneath her gorgeous period gowns, was doing in the role of a protected Edwardian maiden...
...What she is, is a good old-fashioned propagandess, reminding me at times of that other female defender of radical leftist causes, Christabel What's-her-name...
...To call the BBC's coverage of the Taki Theodoracopulos is a European editor of The American Spectator...
...The terrorist act against a TWA jet was not a Greek incident...
...Emerson, George's bohemian father, who does not come off in either the book or the film...
...bombing raid selective would be a gross understatement—a bit like calling Qaddafi unstable...
...On the one hand he was an exquisite writer of social comedy, a miniaturist of Edwardian drawing-room manners...
...Part Bwe simply chuckle at their elaborate manners and fussy scruples...
...what I mean to say is that she counts herself among the wimmin) by the name of Kate Adie, who is the BBC's soi disant reporter in Tripoli...
...George has passionately kissed Lucy under the golden Tuscan sky in a field of violets, while Cecil only reads of such things in books...
...THE TALKIES A ROOM WITH A VIEW by George Sim Johnston The perils of adapting a good novel into film are too well known to rehearse here...
...Part A ,introduces the simpler forms of the language and a basic vocabulary...
...The night I saw the film the audience laughed in many places where I am sure Mr...
...That old clown Tsimas, a man I've written about before, who heads the Greek anti-terrorist squad, once again put on heavy make-up and in an accent 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986...
...Only in A Passage to India was he able to transcend it...
...Not for long, however...
...This is what happened when three TWA passengers were blown out of the airplane after a female terrorist had planted the bomb...
...It is Forster's small tribute to the god Pan, and it works better in the movie than it does in the book...
...George is all awkward instinct, while Cecil is a cultivated cad...
...presents more complex structures and additional vocabulary Order either, or save 10% by ordering both: ^ Basic French, Part A. 12 cassettes (15 hr...
...But even a director of genius could not have crammed Brideshead into two hours and come up with a good movie...
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...1 auoua•FamJm® s.,______.._00 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 nguages also 31 But both she and the movie warm up once we return to England...
...Department of State has spent thousands of dollars developing this course...
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...She has also cut some interesting lines at the end of the novel...
...I wish you a long and happy life, and hope that you continue to win your battles against women, children, and the unarmed...
...left with a stilted costume party...
...The answer is, you don't—and you are George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...
...In A Room with a View a delightful comedy of manners is coupled with a diatribe against Christianity, heterosexual love, and the English bourgeoisie...
...Merchant Ivory Productions, the maker of A Room with a View, did not shy in their last outing from trying to catch a big literary fish with a small net...
...Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay has kept the witty bits in the novel while mercifully excising the gay didacticism...
...Brideshead Revisited, probably the best series ever done on public television, is an exception which proves the rule, because the producers had thirteen hours to work with and were able to serve up a healthy portion of Waugh's prose in the voice-overs...
...Adie's coverage of the raid made it obvious even to Arab-loving people like myself that her script had been written by the Libyan Information Ministry...
...This split between the artist and the thinker (and the first is so much greater than the second) runs like a fissure through his first four novels...
...It's by far the most effective way to learn French at your own convenience and at your own pace...
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...Indeed, the world's leading aviation agencies have declared Athens air-port safe and secure...
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...The whole TV coverage was made up of shots of weeping children, grieving mothers, and outraged Libyans singing hymns of hatred against Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the United States...
...Our 1 2th year...
...Ivory's camera quite comfortably...
...Ivory edited them out for the sake of a more romantic fade-out...
...Try it for three weeks...
...But soon after, word got out that the embattled Yankee tourist may not be flying over this summer, and the greedy ones got worried...
...With its unique "pattern drill" learning method, you set your own pace—testing yourself, correcting errors, reinforcing accurate responses...
...it is almost ludicrous in the movie...
...Suffice to say that if the adaptation is as earnest and literal as the previous efforts of the Merchant Ivory team—if, that is, the film is no more than "literature" conducted by other means—the result is not going to be satisfying...
...If you're not convinced it's the fastest, easiest, most painless way to learn French, return it and we'll refund every penny you paid...
...But being the good trooper that he is, he finally managed to finish the commercial...
...What those closet commies did manage was to make sure the viewers remained in the dark about the reasons for the raid, while no effort was made to put the attack into the context of the many outrages perpetrated by Qaddafi's murder squads against civilians...
...Miss Carter begins—well, not exactly to act, but her pouts become more expressive...
...Foreign service personnel, that's who...
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...My only complaint is that she did not try to do more for the character of Mr...
...The second half, which is set in the English countryside, comes off much better than the opening scenes in and around Florence...
...Which only goes to...
...Her subsequent denial to the three major networks—as well as to the Greek government—was vintage Marx Brothers...
...Their prey was Henry James's The Bostonians...
...What holds the novel together is Forster's exquisite irony and great charm as a storyteller...
...I would wager that Miss Jhabvala kept the lines in her screenplay, and that Mr...
...it is a closet drama which holds Mr...
...After that he lapsed into his famous silence, during which he wrote naughty tales of buggery which he showed to friends and which were published after his death...
...Write is for free catalog...
...you can only work so much exposition into a scene whose main purpose is to show the handsome blond actor Julian Sands finally getting a full repast on Miss Carter's lips...
...text, $135 ^ Basic French, Part B. 18 cassettes (25 hr...
...And speaking of buffoonery, there is a lady (well, she's not, really...
...The mauvaise langues have it that Marshall fell off his chair twice while reading this drivel...
...The trouble is that Qaddafi's and Assad's heroes occasionally manage to murder Greeks, too, even if they are Greek-Americans...
...In fact, if it wasn't so pathetically funny—as well as predictable—one would have to call it the greatest anti-Western and anti-American propaganda show since Idi Amin used the press as a platform for his murderous buffoonery...
...But as the year was 1908 and he wanted to publish, the plot revolves around the competition between Cecil and George Emerson for Lucy's hand and the gradual unwinding of Lucy's self-deception as to where her true affections lie...
...The smaller the novel, the more likely it is that it can be made into a good film...
...George makes two remarks about Lucy's cousin Charlotte which add a necessary final note to this interesting character...
...By itself, the story has good narrative bones for a film-maker to work with...
...prove that there are more pinkos running key posts in the BBC than there are radiation victims in Chernobyl...
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...To his relief, the film was never made...
...As it is, we should be thankful that the Merchant Ivory team was able to translate a beautiful small book into such a fine film with no further insult to either medium...
...and 194-p...
...This is the message Marshall delivered in a stentorian voice, and theone that is sure to win the false advertising prize for the year: "Greece, that loving and lovely land, is getting a bum rap...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
