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Post by topbilled on Mar 12, 2023 20:27:20 GMT
Thank you Andrea for choosing this very special motion picture.
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Post by Andrea Doria on Mar 12, 2023 20:27:31 GMT
Thanks for watching everyone!
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Post by Fading Fast on Mar 12, 2023 20:29:14 GMT
Gary Cooper died in 1961 from cancer. Ann Harding died in 1981 from undisclosed causes. Immediately after her death, if one looked up quickly, a joining of two lights streaking across the night sky could be seen.
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Post by ando on Mar 12, 2023 20:31:29 GMT
Second half was oddly more effective than the first - made you reflect on dreams and the relationship with waking life. Thanks AD.
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Post by Fading Fast on Mar 13, 2023 12:11:25 GMT
Having enjoyed Andrea's showing of Peter Ibbetson on yesterday's "Sunday Live: Don't Be So Melodramatic!", I wrote the following comments last night. If you haven't joined us for a "Sunday Live" yet, give one a shot as we have a lot of fun watching and commenting on the movies.
Peter Ibbetson from 1935 with Gary Cooper, Ann Harding and John Halliday
If they had been making movies in the nineteenth century, Peter Ibbetson, based on writer George du Maurier's 1891 novel of the same name, would have been the type of movie audiences would have understood and appreciated.
Du Maurier (grandfather of noted author Daphne du Maurier) was a writer of the Romantic Era where individual heroism, intensely felt emotions, a transcendental connection to nature, a general religious spiritualism and epic romances were celebrated as some of mankind's highest ideals.
All of these values imbue director Henry Hathaway's thoughtfully slow movie interpretation of Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson.
As very young children, "Gogo" and "Mary" share a brief idyllic friendship as English expats in an upscale suburb of Paris. After his mother passes, though, while he is still a very young boy, "Gogo," whose real name is Peter, is taken to England by his uncle.
The movie then fast forwards to where we see that the adult Peter, played by Gary Cooper, is a strong-willed architect with an unfulfilled romantic yearning.
He is sent on assignment to build new stables for the Duchess of Tower, played by Ann Harding, whom we realize, before Cooper does, is the Mary of his youth.
Harding is married to a decent and kind Duke, played by John Halliday, with whom she has a pleasant, albeit seemingly passionless marriage.
That's a lot of set up - and it takes some time to unfold - for the rest of the movie, which has two parts. First, Harding and Cooper have to discover their shared past as they fall in love anew and, then, fate has to, once more, brutally separates the two lovers.
Parted again, Romantic Era idealism kicks into high gear as Cooper and Harding connect through their dreams, which allows them to live in some spiritually linked neverland on earth until they can finally reunite in the afterlife.
There are of course more earthly details - stables to be built, Dukes to fight, courts to pass judgement and prisons to be locked in - but Peter Ibbetson's heart and soul is the timeless romantic bond Harding and Cooper share from childhood into the great beyond, despite many secular obstacles.
Their abiding love is metaphysically tied through nature as it is not just a physical attraction or regular love; no, theirs is a love for the ages, a love one would gladly die for because it is a love that exceeds our earthly constraints.
Harding and Cooper do a good job carrying the heavy burden of portraying that type of eternal Romantic Era love.
Harding is blessed with an ethereal beauty, a prenatural calmness and a captivatingly dulcet voice that makes her almost look and sound like a visitor from another planet who took a perfect human form.
Cooper is both that handsome, and that good an actor, that he can almost make you believe in an anything-is-possible world.
Cooper would, later in his career, play another strong-willed individualist architect in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
Despite being known today as an ardent advocate of individualism and capitalism, Rand viewed her own writing as "romantic" in the sense of the Romantic Era.
She penned characters, like the architect Cooper played, as unyielding individualists passionately committed to the integrity of their work and the fidelity of their love.
Rand described Cooper's character as a hero not bowed by compromise or public opinion; a man of personal integrity and honor.
Seen in that light, Cooper's architect in Peter Ibbetson is an earlier incarnation of the Randian architect he would play a decade and half later.
Both his Ibbetson and Randian versions are really "romantics" willing to work for free (yes, even in the "capitalist-advocating" The Fountainhead), but the work must be carried out to their exacting standards.
Peter Ibbetson is a throwback movie to a time before there were movies; to a time in the nineteenth century when society's values were profoundly different than they are today or than they were even in the 1930s when the movie was released.
It takes an appreciation, or at least an understanding of the values of the Romantic Era to fully appreciate and understand the intensely romantic Peter Ibbetson. But if one can adjust his or her modern cultural mindset, Peter Ibbetson is a pleasant trip to a more-idealistic time.
N.B. The 2001 movie Kate and Leopold examines a Romantic Era outlook versus our present-day "realistic/pragmatic" outlook when accidental time-traveler Leopold brings his nineteenth-century romantic views of love and his unyielding personal integrity to Kate's 2001 world of business compromise and casual sex. It's a fun romcom whose pivotal moment forces modern Kate to decide which world she prefers.
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Post by topbilled on Mar 13, 2023 15:04:16 GMT
Great review Fading Fast. Makes me want to watch PETER IBBETSON (and THE FOUNTAINHEAD) again!
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