Sir Larry and Ray Harryhausen

My Week With Marilyn (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)Film night moved to Saturday this week and temporarily relocated  to Lewes as wetook the opportunity to see "My Week With Marilyn", missed on its original release, at the Lewes Cinema. This little "cinema" is actually a deconsecrated church and while it has twin 35mm projectors for the authentic film experience it does also have rather less sophisticated sound equipment than modern cinemas and much harder chairs. It's an interesting and perfectly good place to catch up on good films though, and this was well worth it.

Modern Shakespearean luvvy Keneth Branagh gives us his Olivier and who could be better suited? At times his channelling of the great man is quite uncanny. He is ably supported by a number of other well known actors including Dame Judy giving us her Dame Sybil and Zoe Wannemaker her Paula Strasberg. The film really stands or falls on whether one believes in Marilyn though. Portraying such a larger than life icon must have been a task daunting enough to create Monroesque levels of stagefright I imagine but Michelle Williams makes a good fist of it and while perhaps not being able to light up the screen quite so stunningly as Norma Jean, gives a performance good enough to believably sustain the premise of the film.

Based on the memoirs of Colin Clarke, the film takes us behind the scenes of the troubled shoot of the Prince and the Showgirl, the film that caused Olivier to give up the idea of any more directing for many years. The relationship of Clarke and Monroe is central to the piece and Eddie Redmayne is a likeable Colin, reminding me for some reason of the young Michael York. As a biopic of a famous lady I enjoyed it much more than my recent experience with the Mrs Thatcher but then its subject is in many ways the opposite.
 Image via Wikipedia
Monroe/Mortenson/Baker's tragic short life has been written about at great length and her life and death have been the subject of much speculation but it is evident that she was no more dumb than she was blonde. In fact she was full of contradictions: Briefly a literature student at UCLA but seemingly not very educated she was clearly bright as evidenced by many comments by her friends, colleagues and husbands. Often crippled by stagefright to the point of abject terror she exhibited a lot of bravery in other aspects of her life, refusing to turn her back on friends, colleagues and husband Arthur Miller during the House Unamerican Activities hearings and in championing equality for minorities. She determinedly pushed forward the career of Ella Fitzgerald, condemned nuclear weapons and one of her final press statements was a kind of manifesto of universal brotherhood.

Image via WikipediaUnfortunately, her exploitation, fame and perhaps her miserable childhood conspired to create someone at once hugely exposed and ill-equiped to deal with celebrity. This made her maddeningly difficult to deal with as an employee or colleague, often being many hours late to a set and, in later films at least, incapable of remembering the simplest of lines. A succession of miscarriages and a dependence on a cocktail of drugs may have conspired in her increasingly problematic career and ultimate demise. Personally I am inclined to think that this is less likely to have been either murder (despite the interest of the Kennedy involvement - a JFK affair and Bobby having visited on her last day alive for example) or a miserable suicide. It seems to me that she had an awful lot of "guts" which makes that less likely. A worn down constitution and a sad accident seems most likely. I suppose the fact that I have read and pondered such things is a tribute to the way this film makes one consider once more the person behind the legend that was Monroe. It also makes me want to see the Prince and the Showgirl - watch this space.

Returning to base and the now traditional Spitfire beer we watched the next episode of the wonderful Tutti Frutti mentioned last time. The film night finished with Earth vs the Flying Saucers as a very appropriate "B" movie. The main interest in this fairly lavish two disk set of a fifties movie is that it showcases the work of Ray Harryhausen, one of my film heroes for his wonderful stop-motion animation work and its cunning integration with live action. The final scenes where the unlikely weaponry used on the hapless aliens causes their UFOs to crash, almost exclusively into marvellous models of Washington landmarks in some classic Harryhausen scenes. Another delight is the attitudes of the leads who are visibly completely unshaken by the first appearance of a large flying saucer buzzing their car with only feet to spare. One can't help wondering whether the reaction to an apologetic alien species in real life, would be to immediately research a weapon capable of wiping them out.

Given that the film was made a year before the sensational launch of Sputnik the fact that the scientists concerned were initially launching a network of orbiting satellites seemed interestingly prescient. Despite the enormous number of scientific and continuity howlers, there is some footage of V2s and Vikings from the early U.S. space programme which I found very interesting. What I really take away from this film though is the reminder that Harryhausen's creations often have more life than the human actors they support.