“Diary of a Country Priest” (the novel)

Cover of Little Women (Collector’s Series)

Sets, costumes and cinematography are all worthy of the likable job Gillian Armstrong did on the ’94 version of Little Women, a U.S. production with Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder.  The film is a sweet, vigorous semi-fairy tale divorced neither from a certain religious spirit nor from Armstrong’s feminist sensibility.  Much of the acting is subpar, but that’s about the only blemish.

Don’t worry.  One of these days I will also review the old George Cukor film of Little Women.

Cover of Little Women (Collector’s Series)

Sets, costumes and cinematography are all worthy of the likable job Gillian Armstrong did on the ’94 version of Little Women, a U.S. production with Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder.  The film is a sweet, vigorous semi-fairy tale divorced neither from a certain religious spirit nor from Armstrong’s feminist sensibility.  Much of the acting is subpar, but that’s about the only blemish.

Don’t worry.  One of these days I will also review the old George Cukor film of Little Women.

Vivacious Lady (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The premise for the George Stevens comedy, Vivacious Lady (1938), is that a botany professor (James Stewart) hastily marries an amiable nightclub performer (Ginger Rogers), but runs into sundry difficulties in trying to inform his father about it.  The scenario is by P.J. Wolfson and Ernest Pagano, who should have made it funnier than it is, albeit they did zero in on the subject of inconsiderate behavior in marriage.  Vivacious Lady isn’t boring, but in my view the story fails to really gel.

Although there is nothing wrong with Stevens’s sensible directing, the man who made A Place in the Sun and Shane had yet to emerge in ’38.

Bob Rafelson‘s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) concerns the busting-up of foolish dreams in a country of runaway commercialism and fading respectable culture.  (Why, there’s even troilism in the culture now, leading to fatal sexual jealousy!)  It also presents the theme of an individual’s tragic non-control of events in another person’s life.  Thus we have a deeply serious film here, but, sadly, one with a third-rate screenplay by Jacob Brackman.

Cover of The King of Marvin Gardens

Almost as bad is that Rafelson’s direction, besides being pretentious, is rather too imitative of Fellini and Antonioni, something not true of the filmmaker’s Five Easy Pieces.  Still, a few very pleasant scenes and images show up, to which it should be added that one man and one woman—Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn—perform their roles suitably.  Jack Nicholson and Julia Anne Robinson do not.