Hail The Hard Day's Choice -- I Look at Three Films I've Recently Watched Though I Don't Review Them

Sophie's Choice

From Friday night to Saturday night I watched three films. They are very different pictures that I had very different reactions to. It turns out that I have something to say about all three of them. None of them are so much reviews not even that much about the films. But I do have some interesting thoughts — if I do say so myself. So let’s find out what’s on my mind.

Sophie’s Choice (1982) Pakula. I’d just finished reading William Styron’s novel upon which the movie is based. This is a tough act to follow. Styron’s novel is one of the greatest in the American canon. True, there is no single agreed upon canon but if there were Sophie's Choice would have to be in it. You’re asking for disappointment when you go from a great novel to a movie adaptation. Very few cinematic versions live up to the book. Grapes of Wrath did. A Clockwork Orange did. No Country for Old Men also did. But the list of failures is long. I’ve also been down this road with Sophie’s Choice before having read the book a couple of decades before then watching the movie. So I should have seen this coming. The film clocks in at two-and-a-half hours and still leaves out crucial scenes. The novel allows us to inhabit these characters in a way no film could. It creates the worlds that Sophie lived in and fleshes out characters in a way impossible for a film. As a stand-alone I suppose the movie is okay, but it’s difficult to appreciate if you’ve just read the book. I will say that Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline are perfect as Sophie and Nathan and Streep’s Best Actress Oscar is well-deserved. As long as there are movies being made they will be adapting them from popular books. It gives a movie instant name recognition.I am not of the belief that movies have to be “just like” the book. These are adaptations and books are much more layered, richer and detailed than a movie can accomplish. Pakula and company did a nice enough job with the film (maybe it would have been better as a mini-series) and I’ll wager people who never read the book (really you should) like it well enough. Having immersed myself in Styron’s masterpiece the movie was always going to be a disappointment.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) P. Sturges. Feeling depressed, I decided to watch Hail the Conquering Hero. After this latest viewing I've moved it into my top 100 favorite films. It's brilliant. Among his other gifts Preston Sturges was a master at highlighting supporting players as exemplified here. Franklin Pangborn, Raymond Walburn and William Demarest were never better. Pangborn tended to have tiny parts in films (lots of them) but he gets a lot of screen time here and steals scenes. Demarest, as in another Sturges film, Miracle of Morgan's Creek, gets a meaty role and makes the most of it. Among its other gifts, this film really captures the feeling of small town America in the war years. I also appreciate that Woodrow (Eddie Bracken) never wavers in wanting the truth to be known. Ella Raines as the love interest and Freddie Steele as her other fiancee, play everything straight and could be considered somewhat bland. However I found them to be a perfect complement to the rest of the cast. I also always like Al Bridge who here played the laconic political boss. The film is funny, poignant and always makes me feel warm. It's also interesting that I'm somehow very far to the left politically and yet I can imagine people on the other end of the political spectrum responding just as I do to the film which is quite an achievement given it’s gentle skewering of small town politics. The ending is especially revealing. The emotional payoff isn't that Woodrow "gets away with it." It's that he tells the truth despite knowing it may cost him everything. Integrity is the film's highest value, and integrity is something people across the political spectrum generally admire, even if they disagree about almost everything else.

A Hard Day's Night Movie ticket

A Hard Day’s Night (1964). I’ve been watching The Beatles’ first film since its Bay Area premiere in August of 1964 when I was a lad of ten (years not months). That’s sixty-two years that I’ve spent with it. The only movie I’ve been with as long is The Great Escape. I love them both. I love them because they’re great films and I love them because they were there for me when I was a kid and when I was a teen and a young adult and a middle-aged man and now as a doddering old man (Say! Who said I was doddering? Why I oughta sock ‘em one). Watching AHDN last night I mentally traveled back in time (so far that’s the only way you can do it) to when I first saw the movie. I was a month shy of entering the sixth grade. LBJ was president and he was still completing the end of Kennedy’s first term. Vietnam was not a place most people were talking about. Civil Rights legislation was being passed and signed (The White House was for it in those days). The first Super Bowl was years away. The World Series was still being played under the sun. England had yet to win a World Cup and most everyone I knew still had a black and white TV set. The Free Speech Movement on the Cal campus was two months from fruition. The Beatles had changed my life just six months prior with their first appearance on US television — specifically the Ed Sullivan Show. I was making my first attempts at growing my hair out and meeting stiff opposition from my otherwise wonderful father. I was on the verge of developing an interest in the fairer sex, though actually approaching a female with romantic intent was years away. I remember how excited I was to see AHDN. My best friend, Mark Norman, and I had gotten advanced tickets which were large cardboard cut-outs of the Beatles. For some reason I recall that before the movie some slightly older girls sitting a few rows in front of us called us “imps.” I don’t recall why, though knowing us we were probably being obnoxious young boys. It remains the only time in my life that I’ve been called an “imp.” It would be an understatement to say that The Beatles were transformative forces in my life. They were defining. The music alone was enough but adding their style, their charisma, the exposure to something exciting in what had heretofore been for me a somnambulant culture made them forever part of who I am. I’m ever grateful.