Quote of the Day (Thomas Hardy, on a Woman’s Communication of Feelings)

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” — English poet-novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was published. It was a notable success that enabled him to marry Emma Gifford, and to give up architecture so he could concentrate on writing.

The novel also marked a turning point in his subject matter and setting, as he first used the name “Wessex” to represent an imaginary region of south and southwest England.

The heroine of the novel, Bathsheba Everdene, was played by Julie Christie (pictured here) in the 1967 film adaptation by John Schlesinger.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Billy Liar,’ on Starting That Big Novel)

William Terrence “Billy” Fisher (played by Tom Courtenay): “Today's a day of big decisions —going to start writing me novel—2000 words every day, going to start getting up in the morning.”

[Looks at his overgrown thumbnail]

Billy: “I'll cut that for a start. Yes... today's a day of big decisions.”— Billy Liar (1963), screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, adapted from their play based on the novel by Waterhouse, directed by John Schlesinger

This quote will make more than a few writers chuckle. They will read in this not merely Billy’s daydream, but also the daily temptation interfering with serious work. It separates, say, the professional who struggles to translate his dreams into reality—say, F. Scott Fitzgerald—from the millions who stops before getting started, such as Walter Mitty.

Speaking of the latter: Ben Stiller’s remake of the fondly recalled 1947 adaptation of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty will, I fear after watching a trailer, do to that film what Adam Sandler did to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town: violate the warm memories of a perfectly fine cinematic property.

As I dourly ruminated on that this past weekend, I was reminded of another film about a man who escapes from dull reality through daydreams in which he plays multiple roles: the 1963 British film Billy Liar. It premiered in the U.K. early in 1963, but was not released widely in the U.S. until this month a half century ago.

The John Schlesinger film represents a watershed in cinema history. At first glance, it seems merely another in the “angry young man” works that had come to dominate Britain in the last half dozen years before its release: novels, plays and movies about proletarian males stuck in lifeless jobs, with girlfriends who’ll tie them down further, in a film medium that, like the characters’ lives, are without color. Even Billy’s work environment—clerk in an undertaker’s office in Britain’s North Country—is, literally, deadening.

But unlike these other works, Billy Liar generates laughs about the lazy, irresponsible teenage who escapes from hectoring parents, two fiancees and a hectoring boss into the mythical land of Ambrosia. It also has a shaft of real sunlight: a third girl, Liz, who offers love, encouragement and hope—and, in the person of Julie Christie (seen here with Courtenay), a transitional figure into a new age, even a new world.

In fact, I would argue that Ms. Christie, if not perhaps the Fifth Beatle, certainly symbolized the liberated sense of fun and possibilities of life that the Fab Four brought to their nation and the world. In fact, there is a visual link between the two, as attested to by this article in the U.K.’s Coventry Telegraph marking the 50^th anniversary of the appearance of The Beatles at Coventry Theatre, where the group met the up-and-coming actress backstage.

Christie was worried throughout the filming of Billy Liar that she was making the worst possible impression onscreen. Just how irrational that fear was can be gauged by her first appearance in the film. 

Earlier, we’ve been told that she is the type of “crazy” girl who “goes wherever she likes,” leaving one job and town behind for another. Such dialogue becomes superfluous once Christie starts walking down the high street of this drab town, humming a tune and swinging her handbag. She skips over cracks in the paving stones as nimbly, you suspect, as she will over obstacles in her way. A long way geographically from mod London, she is, mentally, just around the corner from it.

Schlesinger shot this scene verite style, catching the startled looks of actual members of a crowd, not actors, at the sight of the radiant actress. He had translated onto celluloid the essence of a young woman who, in real life, had learned habits of self-reliance and independence at English boarding schools, camping on friends’ cots while attending drama school without a scholarship, and protesting in Human Rights Day.

The crowd members in that seminal scene were falling in love with Christie the way the audience would, in only 12 minutes all told onscreen. She was wordlessly but amply demonstrating why Al Pacino would later call her "the most poetic of all actresses."

As the quote above indicates, the day will indeed be one of "big decisions” for Billy, who throws away his chance to join Liz (and realize his own TV writing ambitions) on her journey out of the town. The audience didn’t make the same mistake. John Walsh’s perceptive article in the U.K.’s Independent termed Christie “The Girl Who Showed the Way to the Future.” It’s an apt phrase for one of the glories of Sixties British cinema.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Darling,” on Sex and Children)

Diana Scott (played by Julie Christie, in the accompanying image): “Imagine if...”

Miles Brand (played by Laurence Harvey): “What?”

Diana: “It took three.”

Miles: “Took three?”

Diana: “Sexes. To make a child.”

Miles: “Very entertaining.”

Diana: “Everything would be different, wouldn't it, quite different, with three sexes.”

Miles: “Haven't we got enough problems with two?”—Darling (1965), screenplay by Frederic Raphael, directed by John Schlesinger

A Hard Day’s Night, I believe, blew off, once and for all, the gloom accrued to Britain’s “angry young man” cinema of the early 1960s. But there was a hint the year before, in 1963’s Billy Liar, of similar possibilities. It was embodied in that film by the carefree walk of Julie Christie, representing all the youthful glamour of mod London.

On this day in 1965, the movie that would provide Christie with her sole Oscar to date, Darling, premiered. This cautionary tale of the rise to prominence of a model--and of the men she discarded along the way--was one of two of her films that made a huge splash that year (the other, of course, being Dr. Zhivago).

Cinema, like the memory of a long-ago friend, can freeze an image in time. For me, Christie will always retain the radiance of her twenties. I’m not sure, then, despite her extraordinary gifts, if I’d be able to accept the thought of her as an Alzheimer’s patient in Away From Her. I suspect that those closer in age to her will find this equally challenging to credit.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Hardy, on Fate)

“ ‘I am leaving you…Farewell!’ I said,
As I followed her on
By an alley bare boughs overspread;
‘I soon must be gone!’
Even then the scale might have been turned
Against love by a feather,
—But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in together.”—Thomas Hardy, from “At the Word ‘Farewell,’ in Hardy: Poems (Everyman’s Library, Pocket Poets edition, 1995)

Like Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)—born on this date 170 years ago--was celebrated as a grand master of two forms—the novel and poetry—by the time of his death well into his eighties. And, just as Warren returned again and again to the history-haunted American South, Hardy’s work focused repeatedly on his own special literary province: “Wessex,” based on his native Dorset County, in Great Britain.

I went through something of a Hardy phase in a period of two years, when I was a high-school senior and college freshman. At a time of your life when, all the grown-ups tell you, he world is your oyster, there’s nothing guaranteed to disabuse you of such a notion than full immersion in novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and especially Jude the Obscure.

(Another fan of Hardy’s, I later discovered, was, of all people, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Years ago, he mentioned to reporters about having read The Return of the Native. Disbelieving, they pressed him for more details, and finally gave up when he began to expound upon the fine points of Eustacia Vye. My God, who’d have thought The Boss ever went in for this kind of stuff?)

A benevolent God is notably absent from the literature of this Victorian—in fact, he wrote a poem called “God’s Funeral”—but that didn’t mean that his characters were freed from wrestling with fate. And nothing caught them up in this web so inextricably as the passionate, tortured relations between men and women.

All of life can turn on a touch, as in this poem I’ve quoted, or in Hardy's novels, such as Far From the Madding Crowd, adapted into a 1967 film starring Terence Stamp and Julie Christie (in the image accompanying this post), in a caress close in spirit to our Quote of the Day.

This Day in European History (Gestapo Arrests 'White Rose' Dissidents)

February 18, 1943 – The members of the “White Rose” anti-Nazi group, centered in the University of Munich, were apprehended and arrested by the Gestapo.

Since 1942, as the speed of atrocities had quickened and Germany had gotten bogged down in Stalingrad, these nonviolent activists, consisting mostly of medical students, had surreptitiously printed and distributed pamphlets calling for an end to Hitler’s regime, and even scrawled large graffiti all over Munich: “Down with Hitler! . . . Hitler the Mass Murderer!” and “Freiheit! . . . Freiheit! . . . Freedom! . . . Freedom!”

Yet for months, despite the most strenuous efforts, the Gestapo couldn’t locate the source of this insurrectionary activity, even though it correctly guessed that the group had access to a duplicating machine as well as large quantities of paper, envelopes and postage.

On this date, however, two members of the group, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl—two former members of the Hitler Youth—were discovered. Four days later, the siblings, along with best friend Christoph Probst, were executed after a farce of a trial. Later, three other group members met the same fate.

Today, a square in the University of Munich is named after Hans and Sophie Scholl. A documentary on the group was released in the 1980s, and more recently the film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days earned a much-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. (The interrogation scenes were based on actual Gestapo records that became available only after reunification.) The group has taken its place of honor among those who set the face against Nazism, including the Jesuit Alfred Delp, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the leader in the plot to kill Hitler, Count Claus von Stauffenberg (the subject of the upcoming Tom Cruise film that has caused such controversy).

Two of the finest foreign language films—two of the finest films, period—of recent years dealt with Germany’s experiences with 20th-century totalitarian regimes and the resistance formed against it: Sophie Scholl and The Lives of Others, last year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, on East Germany under Communism.

Why aren’t more such thoughtful, serious movies made? More to the point, why aren’t they made in Hollywood? Part of the problem might stem from the attitudes of Hollywood’s finest stars.

In a New Yorker profile last year, Julie Christie remarked, “I’m not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people Communists are.”

Having just watched her Oscar-winning performance in the 1965 film Darling, I know how superb an actress Christie is, and I’m waiting patiently to see how, four decades later, she has transformed herself into an Alzheimer’s patient in Away From Her.

But comments like these are simply fatuous—particularly from one such as Christie, who chose to appear in tripe like the Brad Pitt film Troy but somehow thinks it beneath her to watch a film that might say something essential about her times.

You have to wonder why she said this. Is it because there are already too many films on this subject? But by the same reasoning, why have another film about Alzheimer’s after the similarly themed Judi Dench film Iris?

This leads logically to the conclusion that the actress might be suffering from either an intellectual or moral deficit. But none of the interviews that Christie has given over the years, nor her longtime anti-nuclear and peace activism, can lead one to believe that she is anything but intelligent.

That leaves us with a moral deficit. How sad that a woman who came to personify all the allure of London in the 1960s possesses such a terrible blind spot. Clearly, she wasn’t paying attention to the part of the script in Doctor Zhivago where her character Lara's friend Pasha (Tom Courtenay), an idealistic revolutionary turned remorseless Communist functionary, says: “History has no room for personal feelings.”

But Christie is hardly unusual in the filmmaking community in her moral failure. Oliver Stone made an admiring documentary about Fidel Castro, Commandante, and has stated that he admires him “because he’s a fighter.” A few years ago, The Motorcycle Diaries related the evolution of Che Guevara’s political thought while on a journey, with no attention, except for a caption at the end, about his career with Castro. (This is a little bit like making a film about Josef Goebbels at the University of Heidelberg and his activities as poet, playwright and novelist without getting into that unfortunate association with Adolf Hitler.) The Robert Redford movie Havana also presented a highly romanticized, Casablanca-influenced version of the commandante’s rise to power.

In fact, the first film I can recall that took Castro to task was Before Night Falls, in which the Cuban dictator was criticized for his cruel anti-gay regime. Yet even before that, Castro had appropriated private property, interfered with religious institutions, refused to allow free and open elections, as well as jailed and, when the need arose, executed political opponents.

Why has the film community so rarely, if ever, covered this? It can’t have anything to do with lack of witnesses – my own elementary and second schools were filled with the children of refugees from his tyranny, and I’m sure there are hundreds of similar schools across the country.

The fact is that nearly 20 years after the end of the Iron Curtain (and more than 60 years after the so-called “Thousand-Year Reich” met its inglorious Gotterdammerung), the world needs to know all the history it can about totalitarian regimes of all kinds.

In his great elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden urged his fellow poets, “In the prison of his days,/Teach the free man how to praise.” That same responsibility – to tell the truth about totalitarianism, no matter what the cost, as the White Rose group did —falls to artists of all kinds, including Ms. Christie—and especially so in this land where today, we celebrate the two men who gave us a new republic and “a new birth of freedom.”