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If two drowning people join hands, don't you think they stand a better chance of being rescued?
I did not expect to love Patrick Garland's A Doll's House (1973). The first time I saw it, I didn't even think I liked Ibsen. I had read a couple of random translations while in high school and seen a memorably mixed production of Hedda Gabler while in college and for years had some of his titles confused with Strindberg's, which is the sort of thing that could reopen the northern theater of the Napoleonic Wars; I can't even remember what I was expecting out of one of the cardinal, perhaps unintentionally but nonetheless feminist plays of the nineteenth century. I was watching it for the cast. I came away fizzing for weeks about the characters and their interlacing into a plot so scrupulously and yet not airlessly patterned that it had at once the rising and falling symmetries of a classical tragedy and all the late-night messiness of a breakup that everyone except the couple concerned could see coming from space; I loved the secondary couple even more and then I never wrote about any of them. January being the month of comings and goings, now seemed as good a time as any to commemorate the slam of a door heard round the world. It is a Christmas story, but we're only just past Epiphany.
Despite my feelings for the B-plot, I really don't want to undersell Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins as Nora and Torvald Helmer. Henrik Ibsen in 1879 was pulling no punches about the stacked deck of patriarchy and at the crest of second-wave feminism neither is Garland; it is not merely monsters of authoritarianism who make bad husbands, not just baby dolls barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen who warp under the weight of being wives. By the lights of his society, Torvald is quite the catch, a responsible provider, a respectable man of business, a virile and handsome mate who's fathered three children on his slim, dark, adorable wife and would gladly engender more. With his promotion to manager of the Joint Stock Bank, he can look forward in the new year not just to the esteem of his new position but the security of its "comfortable income," more than enough to pamper his dear little squirrel who shows off her Christmas shopping with such girlish pride that he can overlook the extravagance for the small price of a lecture on domestic economy, which he despairs of his impulsive darling ever really learning. She can't even pass the confectioner's without sneaking herself a macaroon or two—he dabs the telltale crumb from the corner of her mouth and touches it to his own tongue in teasingly sensual reprimand. For all his methodical air of middle management, he's not a cold man, always kissing and cuddling with Nora, catching his children up to admire them before shepherding them off to the care of their mother and her old nurse, energetic and effusive in his affections. And yet there's something childish about this doting on his family, less like a partner and parent than a boy with the favorite toys someone else will always put away for him when he's tired of playing. His temper is childish too, jollity peeling to petulance at the slightest resistance—brought up short by an expression of surprise instead of expected support, he catechizes his wife far past her actual critique, "What do you mean, petty? Do you think I'm petty? Of course, if you say my behavior is petty, that must mean that I am petty as well!" Would that in nearly a century and a half this picture had become unrecognizable, but boys will be boys, even boys well into their thirties. Then again, as Nora will come to understand as the shape of her life reveals itself to her in all its world turned upside down, she herself is not exactly a real, grown, adult person, either. Torvald's been licensed not to be; she's been discouraged from it. "I believe that before anything else, I am a human being, just as much of one as you are—or at least that I must try to make myself into one." Until then, she exists in the complicit dissonance of an intelligent woman who hasn't yet allowed herself to realize what it is costing her to fit into this charade of blissful domesticity where she plays the doll-wife for her indulgent husband and neither of them has really the first idea of what the other is like. She imagines that in the event of a disaster he'll heed her, comfort her, shield her even at the cost of his own character, as a man who makes so much of his wife ought to do. He showers her with ten-kroner notes like a stripper's rain, chides her fondly as his little "spendswift" and hasn't a clue that she saved his life years ago when she took him out of the country for a desperately unaffordable rest cure, much less that she forged her dying father's signature to get the loan for it and that the scrimpings and savings of her allowance have been going to pay off the debt ever since. She's never dared test the truth against his masculine pride and it's never occurred to him to wonder about the strength of her feminine deception. It's a devastating indictment of their marriage even before the anagnorisis hits the fan and the most devastating part is that it isn't uncommon at all. All it requires, in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, is an acceptance of relationships as ownerships, where trust and communication matter as little as ratifying the ERA. Fortunately for my ability not to scream at history forever, there are a couple of people in this story who know how to talk like adults.
Nils Krogstad was not quite the first role in which I noticed Denholm Elliott, but it remains a brilliant introduction to his gift for tarnish and vulnerability together. In this house of green boughs and gold paper and Christmas candles, his tall crow-stalking figure all in black looks ill-omened, almost demonic when he appears suddenly with the light catching his crooked spectacles half-blind—he would have made a scene-stealing Korovyev in The Master and Margarita—an intrusion from the shifty, shabby underworld of "debt collectors and hack journalists" threatening to drag Nora, for the sake of her one fatal step out of the charmed circle of bourgeois respectability, down into disgrace with him. He was a solicitor once, before his "mistake" that he's quick to say he was never charged with and no one has ever let him forget. He still sounds like one. It makes him even less comfortable to deal with. He has a bitter, explosive snicker, brows angled in ironic disbelief; his dry voice makes even neutrally worded statements sound dangerous and sometimes they are. "Useless or not," he murmurs almost absently; he's just been insulted to his face, "when it comes to business—the sort of business we're engaged in—believe me, I know what I'm talking about." To keep his menial position at the bank, he won't just lean on the new manager's wife to intercede for him, he'll blackmail her upstanding prig of a husband with the secret of the sum she still owes him and the dodginess of its signature if he has to. He has two young sons to take care of and nowhere to turn in this town where clerking for a pittance is the first honest job he's been able to hold since the scandal and even there he's always on the thin inescapable ice of his reputation, the sufferance of decent citizens of whom Torvald seems representative in thinking that Krogstad hasn't paid nearly enough for a crime which he swears bluntly was "no more and no worse" than Nora's own careless falsification and "totally destroyed [his] position in society." With all that resentment and humiliation crackling in his voice, it's no surprise if there's some settling of scores in his ultimatum to the Helmers, but there's even more desperation. We've seen the smoke of the stove and the whining drafts and the line-strung washing in his garret, his boys wrapped in scarves and blankets around the meager table; he's supported them for years by all sorts of shady trades and his confession that he needs to be respectable for their sake is piercing. As menacing as he can be one moment, he's defenselessly awkward the next. He fidgets with his fingernails like an excuse for not meeting people's eyes and stammers so badly over the mention of his past that we can't believe him an entirely hardened character, especially not when it worries him that he might be driving a woman to suicide in his efforts to get the advantage of her husband. As long as he's determined to go through with the blackmail, however, all the sympathy in the audience can't keep him from being just another man with a hold over Nora, which is where Mrs. Linde comes in.
I definitely noticed Anna Massey first as Kristine Linde, even though the character herself is sometimes doing her best to be wallpaper, self-contained and soft-spoken, dressed with the neat plainness of necessity, much too thin for her watchful eyes and the great knot of her pale ginger hair. Since the death of her husband, she's successfully made ends meet in a variety of small professions and it is with knowledge of this experience and her old school ties to his wife that Torvald is cheerful to award her the position from which he's been looking for an excuse to fire Krogstad. It's the sort of gesture that makes him feel not just magnanimous but righteously in service of the social order, rewarding the deserving and dismissing the rest. In place of a "moral cripple" who as the last straw of all his shortcomings keeps forgetting the difference in their stations and embarrassingly addressing Torvald by his first name like the schoolfellows they once were, he's getting a model hard worker, a sober and law-abiding employee whose widowhood only seems to set the seal on her respectability. It's just as well he doesn't know that Kristine herself considers her marriage indistinguishable from prostitution: seven years with a man she didn't love just to support her young brothers and ailing mother before her husband died and left her with "nothing . . . not even grief." The man she did love was Nils Krogstad. They could be a particularly bleak twist on Austen, old lovers separated and then reunited by the unforgiving economics of irony, harrowed so much by their choices along the way that it takes Nora a moment to recognize the old friend waiting quietly in her front hall and Kristine taken aback by her encounter with an equally startled Krogstad remarks simply, "He's changed." She does everything simply: not easily read, but not a dissembler, either. Her decision to deal with the blackmail involves no stratagems of seduction, sentiment, or even moral appeal, merely a conversation with the man she couldn't afford to marry and never stopped wanting, and when he questions her motives with the corrosive, deliberate cynicism of a romantic trying to beat disappointment at its own game, she meets him with the unflinching answer, "A woman who's sold herself once for the sake of others doesn't make the same mistake again." It's the one line on which she flares up and it convinces. We heard the same firmness in a less personal key when she defended him to a family friend of the Helmers, not about to let the casual condemnation—or its vaguely eugenicist language—slide. She calls herself a drowning woman, but she's more like driftwood to the hand, scarred and buoyant. She's the spark in the threads of the plot and she's anything but a device.
I love these battered characters and their chance of a second chance, but I love especially how they play across the A-plot of the Helmers. They look at first like the foxed mirrors of their social betters; they turn out to be the true images. After all the fireworks of the third act, after the whiplashing turn of Torvald violently denouncing his wife when he thinks her dealings with Krogstad have ruined him utterly and then tenderly declaring his forgiveness as soon as he's given the opportunity to destroy the evidence and satisfy himself that all is restored between himself and his little squirrel on whose face the bruise is still rising, Nora dressed as soberly as we have ever seen her seats herself across from her bemused husband and steadily begins, "We've been married eight years. Don't you think it's significant that this is the first time that you and I, as husband and wife, have ever sat down to have a serious talk?" He protests, demurs, tries to laugh off her unaccustomed gravity; she repeats as if it's still unbelievable to her, "We have never sat down and talked and tried to get to the bottom of anything together." She is trying to have a real conversation with him now, explaining almost as she discovers them herself the reasons she cannot stay married to a man who's as much of a stranger to her as she is to herself. It mostly doesn't work. Not because he's stupid, not even because he just doesn't want her to leave, but because he doesn't want it to be true. He liked the doll-world of his household where he was just and munificent and not at all prone to panicky rages or grateful cover-ups, where his wife was frivolous and fulfilled and so endearingly irresponsible that she needed his guidance even to choose a costume for the Christmas ball, and now it turns out that their sexual connection—combustible enough that Nora vetoes his suggestion of trying to live as chaste housemates as much out of self-knowledge as self-protection—may have been the only part of their interactions that wasn't a lie. Their one hope of rapprochement is something Nora somberly believes to be impossible: "Both of us would have to change so much that . . . that our life together would become a marriage." We can't see that needing to happen with Krogstad and Kristine. Even just sitting and talking in the candle-dimness of his garret, warily and bravely, they are modeling the kind of relationship that for Nora and Torvald would take a miracle. There's no posturing for one another, no illusions about themselves. Krogstad braces visibly against the answer, but makes himself ascertain that Kristine knows the full story of his disrepute; she's already admitted she treated him clumsily around her marriage, breaking off their relationship without an honest explanation. As he contemplates the mess he's made of his life and she relates the emptiness of hers, their courtship could be mistaken for a merger of pragmatism, simply a more sustainable solution than their separate unhappinesses. But then watch how she moves to keep him with her just a little longer, how gently, almost tentatively they kiss at the door. He puts a hand to her cheek; she leans into his touch. For once he doesn't sound threatful, sarcastic, ashamed: "I've never been so happy in my life." We can't imagine their future will be easy. Nora steps out into the darkness beyond her front door as if off the stage of her life entirely, but it's too easy to picture Kristine sacked by a vindictive Torvald, Krogstad scribbling again for the gutter press, will they have to try their luck in another town? It's the most wonderful time of the year, which in Ibsen's Norway means it's bloody cold and snowing all the time. There's very little romance in fingerless gloves and shawls draped instead of furs. Even so, we don't worry about them as a couple. They know who they are and they know what they've got and that's what they need most of all. Nora and Torvald fly apart, they draw together like binary stars. Even the MacGuffin gets in on the chiasmus: the impetus for all this splintering and rejoining is Nora's IOU. If you want a measure of how much I like these people, I keep forgetting to mention that the cast also contains Ralph Richardson as the dying Dr. Rank and Edith Evans as the old nurse Anne-Marie, contributing further perspectives on the codes of class and gender and propriety that wall in this world. They, too, even accidentally, help Nora grow up.
For reasons not actually more mystifying to me than the dueling magicians of The Illusionist (2006) and The Prestige (2006), Garland's was one of two versions of A Doll's House released in 1973. The other was adapted by David Mercer and directed by Joseph Losey; it can be found damn near everywhere and I freely admit that despite an equally spectacular cast starting with Jane Fonda, I bounced off the invented prologue and have never gone back. It feels unnecessarily on the nose that the one I am recommending is in a sufficiently subordinate position that it seems to have had one DVD release which I own and which may or may not still be in print. It can be viewed on YouTube if you can stand the burned-in, indifferently accurate subtitles; otherwise I wish you library luck. Christopher Hampton tightened and lightly rearranged the screenplay from his own close translation which had starred Bloom on Broadway in 1971; the alternatingly warm and wintry cinematography by Arthur Ibbetson captures the action more theatrically than cinematically, which isn't a slight at all. The only scoring is a kind of music-box chime suggesting a revolving ballerina or something equally pretty and mechanical. The film isn't a noir, of course, but revisiting it after thirteen years of increasing attention to movies, I couldn't help but wonder if some of the original play had filtered into The Reckless Moment (1949), though if so it feels telling to me that the twentieth-century American ending is the unhappier one. By now I imagine Nora's daughters are legion. Frankly, I hope so are Kristine's. This bond brought to you by my moral backers at Patreon.
Despite my feelings for the B-plot, I really don't want to undersell Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins as Nora and Torvald Helmer. Henrik Ibsen in 1879 was pulling no punches about the stacked deck of patriarchy and at the crest of second-wave feminism neither is Garland; it is not merely monsters of authoritarianism who make bad husbands, not just baby dolls barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen who warp under the weight of being wives. By the lights of his society, Torvald is quite the catch, a responsible provider, a respectable man of business, a virile and handsome mate who's fathered three children on his slim, dark, adorable wife and would gladly engender more. With his promotion to manager of the Joint Stock Bank, he can look forward in the new year not just to the esteem of his new position but the security of its "comfortable income," more than enough to pamper his dear little squirrel who shows off her Christmas shopping with such girlish pride that he can overlook the extravagance for the small price of a lecture on domestic economy, which he despairs of his impulsive darling ever really learning. She can't even pass the confectioner's without sneaking herself a macaroon or two—he dabs the telltale crumb from the corner of her mouth and touches it to his own tongue in teasingly sensual reprimand. For all his methodical air of middle management, he's not a cold man, always kissing and cuddling with Nora, catching his children up to admire them before shepherding them off to the care of their mother and her old nurse, energetic and effusive in his affections. And yet there's something childish about this doting on his family, less like a partner and parent than a boy with the favorite toys someone else will always put away for him when he's tired of playing. His temper is childish too, jollity peeling to petulance at the slightest resistance—brought up short by an expression of surprise instead of expected support, he catechizes his wife far past her actual critique, "What do you mean, petty? Do you think I'm petty? Of course, if you say my behavior is petty, that must mean that I am petty as well!" Would that in nearly a century and a half this picture had become unrecognizable, but boys will be boys, even boys well into their thirties. Then again, as Nora will come to understand as the shape of her life reveals itself to her in all its world turned upside down, she herself is not exactly a real, grown, adult person, either. Torvald's been licensed not to be; she's been discouraged from it. "I believe that before anything else, I am a human being, just as much of one as you are—or at least that I must try to make myself into one." Until then, she exists in the complicit dissonance of an intelligent woman who hasn't yet allowed herself to realize what it is costing her to fit into this charade of blissful domesticity where she plays the doll-wife for her indulgent husband and neither of them has really the first idea of what the other is like. She imagines that in the event of a disaster he'll heed her, comfort her, shield her even at the cost of his own character, as a man who makes so much of his wife ought to do. He showers her with ten-kroner notes like a stripper's rain, chides her fondly as his little "spendswift" and hasn't a clue that she saved his life years ago when she took him out of the country for a desperately unaffordable rest cure, much less that she forged her dying father's signature to get the loan for it and that the scrimpings and savings of her allowance have been going to pay off the debt ever since. She's never dared test the truth against his masculine pride and it's never occurred to him to wonder about the strength of her feminine deception. It's a devastating indictment of their marriage even before the anagnorisis hits the fan and the most devastating part is that it isn't uncommon at all. All it requires, in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, is an acceptance of relationships as ownerships, where trust and communication matter as little as ratifying the ERA. Fortunately for my ability not to scream at history forever, there are a couple of people in this story who know how to talk like adults.
Nils Krogstad was not quite the first role in which I noticed Denholm Elliott, but it remains a brilliant introduction to his gift for tarnish and vulnerability together. In this house of green boughs and gold paper and Christmas candles, his tall crow-stalking figure all in black looks ill-omened, almost demonic when he appears suddenly with the light catching his crooked spectacles half-blind—he would have made a scene-stealing Korovyev in The Master and Margarita—an intrusion from the shifty, shabby underworld of "debt collectors and hack journalists" threatening to drag Nora, for the sake of her one fatal step out of the charmed circle of bourgeois respectability, down into disgrace with him. He was a solicitor once, before his "mistake" that he's quick to say he was never charged with and no one has ever let him forget. He still sounds like one. It makes him even less comfortable to deal with. He has a bitter, explosive snicker, brows angled in ironic disbelief; his dry voice makes even neutrally worded statements sound dangerous and sometimes they are. "Useless or not," he murmurs almost absently; he's just been insulted to his face, "when it comes to business—the sort of business we're engaged in—believe me, I know what I'm talking about." To keep his menial position at the bank, he won't just lean on the new manager's wife to intercede for him, he'll blackmail her upstanding prig of a husband with the secret of the sum she still owes him and the dodginess of its signature if he has to. He has two young sons to take care of and nowhere to turn in this town where clerking for a pittance is the first honest job he's been able to hold since the scandal and even there he's always on the thin inescapable ice of his reputation, the sufferance of decent citizens of whom Torvald seems representative in thinking that Krogstad hasn't paid nearly enough for a crime which he swears bluntly was "no more and no worse" than Nora's own careless falsification and "totally destroyed [his] position in society." With all that resentment and humiliation crackling in his voice, it's no surprise if there's some settling of scores in his ultimatum to the Helmers, but there's even more desperation. We've seen the smoke of the stove and the whining drafts and the line-strung washing in his garret, his boys wrapped in scarves and blankets around the meager table; he's supported them for years by all sorts of shady trades and his confession that he needs to be respectable for their sake is piercing. As menacing as he can be one moment, he's defenselessly awkward the next. He fidgets with his fingernails like an excuse for not meeting people's eyes and stammers so badly over the mention of his past that we can't believe him an entirely hardened character, especially not when it worries him that he might be driving a woman to suicide in his efforts to get the advantage of her husband. As long as he's determined to go through with the blackmail, however, all the sympathy in the audience can't keep him from being just another man with a hold over Nora, which is where Mrs. Linde comes in.
I definitely noticed Anna Massey first as Kristine Linde, even though the character herself is sometimes doing her best to be wallpaper, self-contained and soft-spoken, dressed with the neat plainness of necessity, much too thin for her watchful eyes and the great knot of her pale ginger hair. Since the death of her husband, she's successfully made ends meet in a variety of small professions and it is with knowledge of this experience and her old school ties to his wife that Torvald is cheerful to award her the position from which he's been looking for an excuse to fire Krogstad. It's the sort of gesture that makes him feel not just magnanimous but righteously in service of the social order, rewarding the deserving and dismissing the rest. In place of a "moral cripple" who as the last straw of all his shortcomings keeps forgetting the difference in their stations and embarrassingly addressing Torvald by his first name like the schoolfellows they once were, he's getting a model hard worker, a sober and law-abiding employee whose widowhood only seems to set the seal on her respectability. It's just as well he doesn't know that Kristine herself considers her marriage indistinguishable from prostitution: seven years with a man she didn't love just to support her young brothers and ailing mother before her husband died and left her with "nothing . . . not even grief." The man she did love was Nils Krogstad. They could be a particularly bleak twist on Austen, old lovers separated and then reunited by the unforgiving economics of irony, harrowed so much by their choices along the way that it takes Nora a moment to recognize the old friend waiting quietly in her front hall and Kristine taken aback by her encounter with an equally startled Krogstad remarks simply, "He's changed." She does everything simply: not easily read, but not a dissembler, either. Her decision to deal with the blackmail involves no stratagems of seduction, sentiment, or even moral appeal, merely a conversation with the man she couldn't afford to marry and never stopped wanting, and when he questions her motives with the corrosive, deliberate cynicism of a romantic trying to beat disappointment at its own game, she meets him with the unflinching answer, "A woman who's sold herself once for the sake of others doesn't make the same mistake again." It's the one line on which she flares up and it convinces. We heard the same firmness in a less personal key when she defended him to a family friend of the Helmers, not about to let the casual condemnation—or its vaguely eugenicist language—slide. She calls herself a drowning woman, but she's more like driftwood to the hand, scarred and buoyant. She's the spark in the threads of the plot and she's anything but a device.
I love these battered characters and their chance of a second chance, but I love especially how they play across the A-plot of the Helmers. They look at first like the foxed mirrors of their social betters; they turn out to be the true images. After all the fireworks of the third act, after the whiplashing turn of Torvald violently denouncing his wife when he thinks her dealings with Krogstad have ruined him utterly and then tenderly declaring his forgiveness as soon as he's given the opportunity to destroy the evidence and satisfy himself that all is restored between himself and his little squirrel on whose face the bruise is still rising, Nora dressed as soberly as we have ever seen her seats herself across from her bemused husband and steadily begins, "We've been married eight years. Don't you think it's significant that this is the first time that you and I, as husband and wife, have ever sat down to have a serious talk?" He protests, demurs, tries to laugh off her unaccustomed gravity; she repeats as if it's still unbelievable to her, "We have never sat down and talked and tried to get to the bottom of anything together." She is trying to have a real conversation with him now, explaining almost as she discovers them herself the reasons she cannot stay married to a man who's as much of a stranger to her as she is to herself. It mostly doesn't work. Not because he's stupid, not even because he just doesn't want her to leave, but because he doesn't want it to be true. He liked the doll-world of his household where he was just and munificent and not at all prone to panicky rages or grateful cover-ups, where his wife was frivolous and fulfilled and so endearingly irresponsible that she needed his guidance even to choose a costume for the Christmas ball, and now it turns out that their sexual connection—combustible enough that Nora vetoes his suggestion of trying to live as chaste housemates as much out of self-knowledge as self-protection—may have been the only part of their interactions that wasn't a lie. Their one hope of rapprochement is something Nora somberly believes to be impossible: "Both of us would have to change so much that . . . that our life together would become a marriage." We can't see that needing to happen with Krogstad and Kristine. Even just sitting and talking in the candle-dimness of his garret, warily and bravely, they are modeling the kind of relationship that for Nora and Torvald would take a miracle. There's no posturing for one another, no illusions about themselves. Krogstad braces visibly against the answer, but makes himself ascertain that Kristine knows the full story of his disrepute; she's already admitted she treated him clumsily around her marriage, breaking off their relationship without an honest explanation. As he contemplates the mess he's made of his life and she relates the emptiness of hers, their courtship could be mistaken for a merger of pragmatism, simply a more sustainable solution than their separate unhappinesses. But then watch how she moves to keep him with her just a little longer, how gently, almost tentatively they kiss at the door. He puts a hand to her cheek; she leans into his touch. For once he doesn't sound threatful, sarcastic, ashamed: "I've never been so happy in my life." We can't imagine their future will be easy. Nora steps out into the darkness beyond her front door as if off the stage of her life entirely, but it's too easy to picture Kristine sacked by a vindictive Torvald, Krogstad scribbling again for the gutter press, will they have to try their luck in another town? It's the most wonderful time of the year, which in Ibsen's Norway means it's bloody cold and snowing all the time. There's very little romance in fingerless gloves and shawls draped instead of furs. Even so, we don't worry about them as a couple. They know who they are and they know what they've got and that's what they need most of all. Nora and Torvald fly apart, they draw together like binary stars. Even the MacGuffin gets in on the chiasmus: the impetus for all this splintering and rejoining is Nora's IOU. If you want a measure of how much I like these people, I keep forgetting to mention that the cast also contains Ralph Richardson as the dying Dr. Rank and Edith Evans as the old nurse Anne-Marie, contributing further perspectives on the codes of class and gender and propriety that wall in this world. They, too, even accidentally, help Nora grow up.
For reasons not actually more mystifying to me than the dueling magicians of The Illusionist (2006) and The Prestige (2006), Garland's was one of two versions of A Doll's House released in 1973. The other was adapted by David Mercer and directed by Joseph Losey; it can be found damn near everywhere and I freely admit that despite an equally spectacular cast starting with Jane Fonda, I bounced off the invented prologue and have never gone back. It feels unnecessarily on the nose that the one I am recommending is in a sufficiently subordinate position that it seems to have had one DVD release which I own and which may or may not still be in print. It can be viewed on YouTube if you can stand the burned-in, indifferently accurate subtitles; otherwise I wish you library luck. Christopher Hampton tightened and lightly rearranged the screenplay from his own close translation which had starred Bloom on Broadway in 1971; the alternatingly warm and wintry cinematography by Arthur Ibbetson captures the action more theatrically than cinematically, which isn't a slight at all. The only scoring is a kind of music-box chime suggesting a revolving ballerina or something equally pretty and mechanical. The film isn't a noir, of course, but revisiting it after thirteen years of increasing attention to movies, I couldn't help but wonder if some of the original play had filtered into The Reckless Moment (1949), though if so it feels telling to me that the twentieth-century American ending is the unhappier one. By now I imagine Nora's daughters are legion. Frankly, I hope so are Kristine's. This bond brought to you by my moral backers at Patreon.
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I have not, but I can see why you class the two. In terms of watching, do you recommend a production?
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I suppose I should take a look sometime, but I often dread seeing things staged that I loved on the page, because if it doesn’t work for me it’s worse than a disappointing novel-to-movie adaptation, since it’s the exact work as written but not as I imagined it.
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I don't think it's gone out of fashion: I've read scripts throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first that feel like they're trying to reproduce the effect of seeing the production on the page, even if the page came first. I agree that Shaw is kind of astonishing about it. Unfortunately for him, I still love Leslie Howard's Henry Higgins.
I suppose I should take a look sometime, but I often dread seeing things staged that I loved on the page, because if it doesn’t work for me it’s worse than a disappointing novel-to-movie adaptation, since it’s the exact work as written but not as I imagined it.
I'm trying to remember if that's ever happened with me. I was once notably disappointed by the book of a musical when I had loved its score, but in all of the cases where I read a playscript or a screenplay before seeing a production, I think at the least I have always found it interesting. That may just mean that I've been lucky in not hitting any disasters.
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Also, I am here for courtship[s that] could be mistaken for a merger of pragmatism. They're very present in my brain. *ducks* Also that may crop up elsewhere with credit.
Felicitations on turning Ibsen's proto-feminist downer into a Christmas movie! You are the only one who could have made me believe it.
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Thank you! I am trying not to let so many of the movies I love languish unremarked. There's a depressing number of them.
Also, I am here for courtship[s that] could be mistaken for a merger of pragmatism. They're very present in my brain. *ducks* Also that may crop up elsewhere with credit.
With my permission! And I have noticed that a little, yes.
Felicitations on turning Ibsen's proto-feminist downer into a Christmas movie! You are the only one who could have made me believe it.
I take that seriously and I am glad to have done so. That said, I can't ultimately think of the story as a downer when it ends with Nora leaving. It would have been a tragedy if she had stayed.
(first use of 'merger' was in 1728)
I had no idea! That's handy.
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I think I've found the problem!
*hugs*
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That's the nicest football team I've ever heard of.
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https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/joseph-gazzola-obituary?pid=1936842
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His memory for a blessing, damn it.
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> my face to the wall
The logic here eludes me. What was this expected to accomplish?
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I don't grok his attitude. Mind your own beeswax!
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That's absolutely a stellar cast.
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Thank you. I wanted to do it justice.
That's absolutely a stellar cast.
It's ridiculous. Normally Ralph Richardson is the first thing in a movie I talk about!
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Thank you, mow. It was important to me.
Too bad applying middle management to the family doesn't do a thing.
It really doesn't! And he's written and played to be human, so that we understand him as truly undone when that door slams famously shut on the shattered illusions of his marriage and his world, but he never bothered to look below those illusions in the first place. He took the surfaces of things for their realities. It was tidy and convenient and required no extra effort of him—jobsworth love. He's one of the characters where I'd like to think that he'll grow from the shock of self-discovery, but I really don't know. Any more than he does with Nora, Ibsen isn't telling.
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Let me know what you think if you do! It held up for me.
Recently a local cable station was supposed to be showing it, but instead they showed the Losey version, and I bounced off the bit of it I saw.
They get confused even in internet searches. The Roku Channel thought it had the Garland version and then I clicked through and it was Losey; ditto Tubi. I get that the film works with a lot of doubling and reflecting, but that's no excuse.
Which bit did you bounce off of? I have no reason to believe that Fonda wouldn't have made a good Nora, and I've liked everything by Losey that I've seen so far, but frontloading everyone's precisely revealed histories as the opening action just did not work for me and the fact that either the director or the screenwriter thought it was a good idea felt like it was warning me off the rest of the interpretation.
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I read this in high school, and should go back to it, as I imagine I would have substantially more nuanced reactions to it now with a couple decades more life experience under my belt.
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I really think I read A Doll's House in high school (not for class, but because one of my friends was reading it for class and I read their copy when they weren't using it, which is how I encountered most of the Western canon between tenth grade and not being in school anymore), but if so it made so little impression on me at the time that seeing the film was like coming to it new and returning to it thirteen years later definitely brought further perspectives, which was nice to know, because I prefer my art to do that.
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> northern theater of the Napoleonic Wars
This is what gets hidden in the shrubbery of these large dense reviews. This is why they must be read twice to be fully gleaned of their value.
I sure hope you're planning a book of these.
- G.
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Thank you!
I sure hope you're planning a book of these.
I would in fact love to publish one. I need to figure out the workings of nonfiction presses—all my experience has been with fiction and poetry—and get past my gun-shyness around academia.
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The tenacity of the brainwashing that teaches women to be mere things of one sort or another... it's sobering and depressing--and insidious. I was talking to a middle-aged woman the other day who was reflecting on being stuck in a job where whatever decisions she took in key matters, she **had** to make someone unhappy, and that their unhappiness had been making her feel--until recently, until she started thinking about it--like a bad person... because her unexamined, unreflecting, burned-into-her upbringing implicitly stated that a woman who doesn't please isn't a good person. (The post-ellipsis part is my analysis, not hers.)
So you get intelligent people who may even be working diligently "for good," but they aren't doing it from a place of mental freedom. It sounds like what Kristine realized earlier and what Nora is reaching for by the end of the play.
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Hooray!
I am inordinately happy that it's available on YouTube! I will definitely watch it. I've known *of* A Doll's House but never seen a production of it.
I've never seen another one! The Huntington Theatrea actually staged it in early 2017, but I missed it. I used to keep an eye out for a script of Hampton's translation when I visited used book stores—I never had any luck. I suppose I'll try again when it becomes safe to do so.
The tenacity of the brainwashing that teaches women to be mere things of one sort or another... it's sobering and depressing--and insidious.
It is deeply frustrating that it hasn't dated the play more. It is no longer so unusual for wives to leave their husbands, but Nora's reasons for leaving haven't gone out of style and in a hundred and forty-two years they really should have. I suppose the inability to see other people for themselves is timeless.
and that their unhappiness had been making her feel--until recently, until she started thinking about it--like a bad person... because her unexamined, unreflecting, burned-into-her upbringing implicitly stated that a woman who doesn't please isn't a good person.
That makes me think of this article, which makes the dismally credible point that the definition creep of self-care has managed to work the term around to reinforcing even more that women are never supposed to take time for themselves now that necessary actions like running an errand or eating a meal have been recast as "self-care."
So you get intelligent people who may even be working diligently "for good," but they aren't doing it from a place of mental freedom. It sounds like what Kristine realized earlier and what Nora is reaching for by the end of the play.
I think that's true. Kristine's had that chance to live on her own, to find out what sort of person she is when she isn't obliged to support a family or please a husband; when she tells Krogstad, "There's no happiness left in working for yourself," it doesn't sound like the party line of a woman who's been conditioned to make herself useful, it sounds like the plain truth from a woman who's been self-supporting for years. She and Krogstad are choosing one another—she makes the first move and waits to see if he'll answer in kind. It's so different from Nora's description of her marriage as the entrusting of a cherished object from father to son-in-law. It looks a hell of a lot healthier from here.
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It was really good! I really liked Krogstad; I think he was my favorite.
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That seems somehow like an appropriate frame.
amazing/depressing
Exactly that! It's like a pre-Code movie in that respect—these ideas didn't spring from the forehead of Athene in the second half of the twentieth century. They're so recognizable and we shouldn't still be wrestling with the problems that produced them, but here we are.
Because the play is focused on Nora's mental/moral/personal growth, she doesn't even castigate him for his incredible hypocrisy, but I really would have liked to have him have to face that, because WOW.
And he doesn't even notice what he's revealed; that's damning in itself. He can't see that his wife is staring at him like a stranger. He has no idea the audience wants to reach through time and shake him until he rattles with his selfishness. It struck me this time around that Torvald's the only one of the characters who has the luxury of his illusions—Nora's are in self-defense and Krogstad and Kristine simply can't afford them. That's privilege. I want him to be able to grow, because I like it best when people do, but I don't know his chances.
It was really good! I really liked Krogstad; I think he was my favorite.
I'm so glad! Mine, too, but then closely seconded by Kristine. I really do think they're going to be all right.
the medium article
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I have a very hard time letting people do things for or instead of me when I know how to do them; I know it's not useful. I can only imagine how it complicates with children.
I think one thing that's impressive about Nora at the end is that she *is* consciously relinquishing those duties.
Agreed. And I am not sure I had quite thought about it in that context, so thank you.
Re: the medium article