Then the pink and then the may

Maybe not the end of an era? The mighty rosefox used their knowledge of LJ styles and layers to get me back a fairly decent facsimile of Refried Paper, with icons, yet! It's got some weird glitches I'm still trying to figure out how to amend (moral of this story: learn CSS), but at least it actually looks like my own journal again.

In the meantime, I have started adding tags to my entries. So far I've got one. It's for my Patreon reviews. I can already tell that I will want to be completist with genre and director and main cast and key subjects and I had better not, because that's what the AFI Catalog of Feature Films is for. Or Tumblr.

I don't think that I want to spend an entire review on Green Dolphin Street (1947). I watched it last night, after finishing the source novel the previous week. Taken on its own merits as a historical potboiler, it's fun. Taken as a version of Elizabeth Goudge, it may cause bleeding from the eyes. I am ambivalent about the novel Green Dolphin Country (U.S. Green Dolphin Street, 1944), but I can see why it was an attractive prospect for a studio like MGM—it's a sweeping, world-spanning, three-generation family saga revolving around a dramatic romantic mistake redeemed, in both the conventional and the religious senses, by the consequences rippling out to transform not only the three characters immediately involved, but everyone whom their lives touch thereafter. It has moments of the numinous that prefigure The Valley of Song (1951) in their fusion of Faerie and Paradise. It's trying hard with the Māori characters, but well-intentioned clichés are still clichés. It is a great novel of the sea. And I'm not at all surprised that I bounced so severely off it the first time around: it's one of her books that put their reader at a disadvantage for not being Christian. I don't mean that it made me feel scolded or preached at, I mean that it's written with such a depth of assumption that it renders some of the characters' motives opaque to me, since they are based on convictions and values which are not only not mine, but which the narrative takes so profoundly for granted, the reasons for the decisions they produce are never explained. It lends the novel a curiously genre quality, actually—the past is another country, but so is Anglicanism. When the film is Christian, it's in Hollywood ways: it's not strange to me, I just don't agree with it. Not strange is, I think, the most damning thing I can say about Green Dolphin Street. Allowing for the inevitable compression of the novel's half-century timeline and the excision of most of its subplots, it's actually a relatively faithful adaptation; it hits most of the novel's key points, including some I didn't expect to see filmed, and it even preserves some of the dialogue line-for-line, or close enough that I could recognize it from one reading. The emotional and intellectual effect is entirely different. It's the simplified romantic version, streamlined and fitted to familiarity. Every now and then a moment in key with Goudge flashes out of the melodrama and it is both jarringly out of place and the most interesting thing for half an hour around it. I don't blame the cast, who are Donna Reed and Lana Turner as dissimilar sisters and Richard Hart and Van Heflin as the men who respectively love them; they are all less flawed than their book counterparts, but everyone gets at least one memorable scene. I am amused that Heflin plays the character I would have liked best in the book if I had managed to read it in high school. Hart had an unusual face for a leading man, by which I mean that I spent forty minutes trying to figure out who he kept reminding me of and the answer turned out to be Chris Barrie circa the first two seasons of Red Dwarf. He made four films and died young. Neither of them should ever have been made to wear a mustache. Meanwhile Reed and Turner bear up bravely under their spectacularly ahistorical hair. Basically, Green Dolphin Street is the kind of expensive, homogenized adaptation I was braced for Madame Bovary (1949) to be and was so delighted when it wasn't. Maybe someone should have read Minnelli in on this one. The New Zealand earthquake, however, is all the special effects extravaganza it was cracked up to be. Mattes, models, full-scale practical effects, rear projection, the works—it's technically impressive and artistically admirable and the internet tells me it won the film an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1948. I just wish the rest of the story had been treated with the same enthusiasm and care. Not to mention the Māori.

Now that Mythic Delirium has an alphabetical index of authors, I can point toward a small archive of my publications; they're filed under "T."

My e-mail is still kaput.