Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kirkland Film Society...
...natural, then, in a film based on Henry James' novel The Europeans to look for someone with penetrating eyes--the filmmaker or even a character--who will transform the moving picture into insightful frames. In the film the most likely character to make such critical judgments is an old Bostonian, Mr. Wentworth (Wesley Addy), a father who sets the somber, reflective tone of his family's life. But he reserves and understates his opinions, narrating the actions of his European cousins more with his expressive eyes than with his voice...
...politeness is not the only reason the film The Europeans lacks an analytic persona. The director, James Ivory, as well as both Wentworth and James himself are, as Wentworth states in the novel, aware that "Forming an opinion--say on a person's conduct--was a good deal like fumbling in a lock with a key chosen at hazard." As analyzing human nature can be slightly slow, clumsy and difficult on paper, so much harder is it to render it on film ready made for passive viewing in a theater. Without an insightful narrator or character who is willing...
...taking all the characters at face value, their face values lack complexity and beauty of character. Henry James is missing. Still, there are some things the film captures in their ripe fulness. Where the frontality of the characters makes us want a wise mediator, the simple scenes of a New England autumn in rain and in shine, the bubbliness of rambunctious young love, the sound of crickets at night and of a cello playing "Tis the Gift to be Simple" seduce us into forgetting for a moment the key-fumbling criticisms and to trust without sorrow that everything is just...
...concert pianist, Tiomkin left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, made his Paris concert debut in 1924 and two years later performed for the first time in the U.S. Caught in the rush of talent to Hollywood in the early '30s, he went on to write more than 160 film scores, including those for the original Lost Horizon, Giant, The Guns of Navarone and 55 Days at Peking. Accepting his Oscar in 1955 for his score for The High and the Mighty, Tiomkin, good-humored and self-effacing, won the hearts of his audience when he thanked his four collaborators...