The Talkies/Lost in Africa
Schonburg, Alexandra
sift through the vast bulk of entries, filtering out the lesser efforts and setting aside twenty-five for a closer reading. The team of Bradbury-Hemingway et al. is then sequestered in Harry's for a...
...For a worthy Denys one dreams of seeing a Nigel Havers (Chariots of Fire) or a Jeremy Irons or a young Laurence Olivier...
...She felt the same abandonment later with Denys Finch Hatton, whose fear of being bored and love of freedom dominated his life...
...Dinesen came from a rich upper-middle-class Danish family, but loved being ad-dressed as Baroness and suffered greatly from her divorce...
...on one occasion, a judge was carried out by his colleagues...
...More-over Dinesen's great loneliness, broken only by the brief—albeit passionate and fulfilling—comings and goings of Denys, becomes a burden to the story...
...Her husband, Baron Bror von Blixen, convincingly played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, is continuously unfaithful...
...It is a poor performance...
...Ultimately, when she could not meet these demands she lost the farm...
...Denys is played by Robert Redford, who I imagine thought that if he could pass for a seventeen-year-old baseball player in the The Natural (with, I might add, a lot of back lighting), he could now pass for an English aristocrat...
...She fell in love with the country and its people immediately: "As for me, from my first weeks in Africa, I had felt a great affection for the natives...
...They may taste some carpaccio with mustard and mayonnaise sauce (a delightful dish named for the painter, who used a color similar to that of the rare roast beef it consists of), sample some wine, and pronounce the winner...
...affection for each other, but their marriage was basically one of convenience: she provided the money, he the title...
...He goes off on endless safaris...
...LOST IN AFRICA Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack's adaptation of Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Kenya from 1914 to 1931, begins with Meryl Streep's haunting voice reading the first sentence of Dinesen's book: "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills...
...Bror Blixen was a rather coarse, uneducated man, whose main goal in life was to have a good time...
...The film does not effectively convey the passing of time, those seventeen years of Dinesen's struggle to keep her coffee plantation going against nature's disasters and her creditors' demands...
...he looks like a cowboy dressed by Ralph Lauren...
...The rights to that book were bought in 1978 by Anna Cataldi who, after years of struggle, finally managed to get Kurt Luedtke interested in writing the screenplay for one of the great romances of the century.^ 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986...
...Jeeves, my helicopter pilot, is nowhere in sight, nor is the blonde in the Maserati...
...It was a strong feeling that embraced all ages and both sexes—the discovery of the dark races was to me a magnificent enlargement of all my world...
...Dinesen was a social climber who wanted the title so much that when she caught syphilis she said: "If it didn't sound so beastly I might say that, the world being as it is, it was worthwhile having syphilis in order to become a Baroness...
...Finally, says Bill Moyles, the manager of Harry's, "The more ludicrous, the bet-ter...
...She has a tail, but it is not the finny type required of mermaids...
...He chooses Mozart, and in so doing gives the film a touch of refinement and lyricism...
...No Trucka brings my rusty steed and I am off, heading north on a darkling trail of concrete, bound for dusty Bakersfield...
...The idea of this movie had been in the minds of many people...
...Two men clad in what look to be Brooks Brothers suits take stools on my left...
...Deadpan and quick, Max says, "So your seats are far away...
...We're on our way to the theatre...
...Next, a relationship betweena man and a woman is a plus...
...He and Dinesen had a certain attraction and Alexandra Schonburg is a free-lance writer who lives in New York...
...When Freddy came along, you just had to go to New York," he says...
...It has stood up as well if not better than any of Hemingway's short stories, though not as well known...
...One of the Brooks Boys protests: "No, we were at the races...
...It is the story of a woman who, in her own words, wanted "to fascinate and be fascinated," who struggled for a passionate life against her fear of being abandoned...
...Bunnies look more real in the magazine than in the flesh...
...Out of Africa, the book, is a memoir, an anthropologist's notebook, and also one of the finest stories of life in Africa...
...For background music Pollack strikes a compromise...
...She does not, but before the burial she paints her face like a mask, putting kohl under her eyes and white powder on her cheeks...
...He loved Nijinsky, Beaudelaire, the Bloomsbury group, modern art and music...
...I just kept on going...
...The night Dinesen finds out about Denys's death, she wants to take her own life...
...She plays the aristocrat perfectly, with arrogance, elegance, and charm...
...An English aristocrat, old Etonian, soldier, white hunter, and eccentric, Finch Hatton would fly to London from Kenya for a night to see one of Diaghilev's ballets...
...Her great love of nature and her desire for adventure must have influenced her move to Africa...
...The theme of the movie is loss...
...How I knew it...
...He is bug-eyed, alert, garrulous...
...The towheaded fellow on the barstool on my right is here from Jefferson City, Missouri...
...She leaves Africa destitute...
...A lissome hostess agrees to punch my parking tag...
...Redford is miscast...
...Bartender again sees my penmanship in action, asks how my entry is coming...
...Stravinsky was a particular favorite...
...The fear began when she was ten with her father's suicide and continued throughout her life in her relationships with men...
...Her dress, covered with iridescent blue, scaly sequins, adds to the marine creature look...
...He scorned Beethoven as vulgar...
...In Africa, Dinesen was a foreigner looked down upon by English society...
...The shots of Africa are superb: each of the scenes was first painted in water color by the production designer, Steven Grimes, who also worked on Ryan's Daughter and On Golden Pond...
...Back at the bar, my Edinburgh bar-man tells me he ended up here because of Freddy Laker...
...She often suffered from depression, arising from Bror's continual philanderings with different European women, including the wife of a close friend, and her discovery that her husband had given her syphilis...
...A show-me boy...
...He is unreliable, irresponsible, improvident...
...Truck Stopper appears more than moderately interested when I mention the Playboy Club upstairs...
...It must have been of enormous comfort at a time of total desolation, for now she realized that she had lost everything she had lived for over the past seventeen years: her lover dead, her husband gone, and her beloved farm lost...
...What do the judges look for...
...Having overheard, others along the bar stare deeply at this affable young hayseed as if hair might suddenly sprout from between his pearly teeth...
...Irish coffees up and down the immaculate bar that seats no more than a dozen mostly high-backed people with unobtrusive elbows...
...Each of his water-color scenes has been faithfully adapted by Pollack, giving us a vivid sense of Kenya's beauty...
...Each rests a pair of binoculars and folded Playbills on the bar...
...Judith Thurman, in a recent biography of Dinesen, quotes her on jealousy: "It is as if a claw had grabbed your heart, as if you had been shaken and tumbled by a wild animal...
...by Alexandra Schonburg Her affair with Denys gave her recognition, especially after his death in an airplane crash...
...THE TALKIES...
...Meryl Streep is at her best here...
...One wonders whom he thought he was playing and why...
...but he is charming, and Dinesen is clearly taken by him...
...Dinesen had charm, intelligence, and talent...
...Bror eventually left her and asked for a divorce...
...First, the grammar must be flawless...
...Invariably, several bottles of Chardonnay are consumed...
...Humor is second...
...He is in town with his father for the National Truck Stop Association's annual convention...
...is then sequestered in Harry's for a final judgment day, with the bar closed to the public...
...It is the mask behind which she will hide until her death...
...How I remember it...
...Woman on the barstool beside me makeslanguid, fishlike movements as if wanting to be seen, i.e., noticed...
...But this fascinating book and Dinesen's fascinating character were not enough to make a movie, not until Errol Trzelinskv discovered the love story between Dinesen and Denys in a book, Silence Will Speak...
...At his burial the English community regarded her as his widow...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
