I’ve always backed away from reading Allen Drury’s novel Advise and Consent because of its length, but I have now seen the Otto Preminger film adaptation and was glad I did.  It revolves around a President’s nomination of a highly controversial man as Secretary of State, and the tension between pronounced anti-Communism (of the early 60s) and the fervent desire for peace comes to the fore.  This is the fulcrum for skullduggery, including that of a felonious leftist.

Probably the film is faithful to the novel—others could tell me—since author Drury was decidedly against Communism and, here, the anti-anti-Communism which arose during the 1960s has no room to breathe.  The work is at fault for not displaying sufficient sympathy for a man who commits suicide, but at least one appreciates the gravity and evenhandedness of Wendell Mayes’s script.  Although there is too much starchiness in the acting, virtue arises as well.  Charles Laughton proves adept at playing a Southern conservative Congressman, and as politicians, Walter Pidgeon and Don Murray are no slouches either.

Advise and Consent isn’t art, but it has the advantage of being drama that makes sense.

Cover of Advise and Consent

Contrary to the thought of author Milan Kundera, there is no lightness of being, unbearable or otherwise, owing to our being allowed to live only one life (with death as the final end).  Not that such lightness is effectively captured anyway by filmmaker Philip Kaufman in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), based on Kundera’s novel.

I have read the novel once, but do not know how genuinely good it is.  Philosophical small potatoes as it is, and lamentably long, the film strikes me as not good.  Unlike the book, it is thematically wispy.  Miscast as a sensualist, Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t have that much to do but is solid enough.  He plays Tomas, who loves the woman he marries, Tereza, but philanders a lot.  There is, I think, too much nudity in the film, although the oft-naked Lena Olin (Sabina) is a gorgeous and disarming curiosity.  Just as successful is Juliette Binoche (Tereza).  Admirable images crop up in the flick, but it is sometimes tedious.  And the Janacek music on the soundtrack is often inappropriate.  In truth, the cinematic Unbearable Lightness has no raison d’etre.  This one by Kaufman doesn’t.

A 1928 silent picture, The Garden of Eden, is a non-slapstick comedy adapted from a play.  I don’t know the play, but director Lewis Milestone seems to have known exactly what he was doing in filming it.

The source of the film’s success is not really the far-fetched but enticing story, but rather Corinne Griffith‘s performance.  The Texas-born actress, now forgotten, was a star, a published author, and an anomaly.  In Eden, she displays impressive restraint (not hyperbole) and variation.  The good Lowell Sherman is also on hand, and together they almost make this decent movie lovable.

A 1928 silent picture, The Garden of Eden, is a non-slapstick comedy adapted from a play.  I don’t know the play, but director Lewis Milestone seems to have known exactly what he was doing in filming it.

The source of the film’s success is not really the far-fetched but enticing story, but rather Corinne Griffith‘s performance.  The Texas-born actress, now forgotten, was a star, a published author, and an anomaly.  In Eden, she displays impressive restraint (not hyperbole) and variation.  The good Lowell Sherman is also on hand, and together they almost make this decent movie lovable.

On Marcelino Pan y Vino (1955):

A group of monks, living long ago in Spain, adopt an orphan child left at the monastery door.  Given the name of Marcelino, the boy (Pablito Calvo) grows to be both a delightful and a mischievous 5-year-old, though also one who is lonely.  He invents an invisible friend, who is gradually replaced by a visible one:  a statue of Jesus Christ, crucified, come to life!

Because the God-man is hungry, the boy brings him bread and wine from the monks’ kitchen, thus inspiring Jesus to rename the child Marcelino Pan y Vino (Marcelino Bread and Wine).  Problems the monks have with a hostile town mayor and probable freethinker are solved through a final stunning miracle Jesus performs and which the monks ecstatically witness.  Once again it’s a miracle involving Marcelino.

This is an imaginatively made, deeply religious Spanish film directed by Ladislao Vajda (a Hungarian!)  In a way it confirms the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes:  “the day of death [is better] than the day of one’s birth” (7:1).  Marcelino misses having a mother, and for him, not having a mother on earth means having one in Heaven.  The boy asks Jesus, “Where is your mother?”  “She is with yours,” Jesus replies.  Several low-angle shots of the landscape under a spacious sky are meant to emphasize the existence not only of God but also of Heaven.

For God, to be sure, is not simply up above.  “Do you know who I am?” Jesus asks Marcelino.  ‘Yes,” says the boy.  “God.”  This after a crucified man appears in a monastery’s attic.  Marcelino Pan y Vino is a gentle picture truly accepting of the supernatural and the miraculous.

Cover via Amazon

(In Spanish with English subtitles.)