Just Watching: The Bicycle Thief

~ Jane ~ 8 Comments

Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean Lumière were pioneers of the film industry in the 1890s and La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, 1896) is considered to be the first film ever made. Though each of their films is only 40 to 50 seconds, showing candid portrayals of working class France, they’re the purest form of realism, referred to as actualités, or actuality films, and have a direct influence on the Italian Neorealism movement 40 years later.

Focusing on the harsh truths of life around them, during and post WW11, filmmakers including Visconti and Fellini often hired non professional actors, and made a point of using real settings rather than sets, with real people in the background, showing the collective anxiety of the time with unadulterated authenticity. Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta  (1945) is the first fully realized film of the genre and it’s shocking in its depiction of torture and life under an authoritarian regime; but Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief from 1948 is perhaps the most well known.

The story follows Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) as he gets a job hanging film posters, but for the job he must have a bicycle. He and his wife Maria (Lianella Carell) must first pawn the sheets from their beds to buy back the bicycle they have already pawned. The delight at at last having a steady income, the excitement over what this will mean for their family is shattered when the bicycle is stolen and Antonio loses his job. He searches the city with his son Bruno (Enzo Stajola), eventually finding the thief but without proof there’s nothing they can do.

The desperation of poverty is stark and the uneven distribution of wealth that we see as they chase through markets, a soup kitchen, and then their decision to stop at a trattoria, is shown through a politically charged mindset that doesn’t attempt to gloss over the reality. Their plight is desperate, but the relationship between father and son is full of warmth, not always in agreement, but they’re a team; there are no rosy answers but Antonio learns a lesson about dignity.

The Master of Ballantrae

~ Jane ~ 19 Comments

Reminding me of those lovely old Gainsborough films, the story is told through the memoir of Ephraim Mackellar, Lord Steward for forty years on the Durisdeer estate in Scotland.

It all begins in 1745 with the eighth Lord of Durisdeer, at home with his eldest son James, the Master of Ballantrea, popular and wild, he loves wine and cards, women and being in on the fight; his younger son, Henry, and Miss Alison Graeme, an orphan from a remote part of the family who has lived with them since a girl and is the heir to a considerable fortune. Now it’s understood that there’s an understanding between the Master and Miss Alison and as the Durisdeer land is heavily mortgaged, they need that money; Alison is very willing.

When news arrives that Prince Charles Edward; has landed in Scotland attempting to reclaim the throne for his father and proclaim him James VIII of Scotland our James, the Master of Ballantrea has his head turned by the sense of adventure and leaves to join the Jacobite rebellion. Henry, left at home with Alison to run the estate, hears news that the uprising has failed and believing James to be dead, takes the title of Lord Durisdeer and Alison as his wife. Oh dear.

Continue reading “The Master of Ballantrae” →

Cards on the Table

~ Jane ~ 14 Comments

This year’s ReadChristie Challenge has the prompts Biggest, Best, Beloved and for January the chosen book was The Body in the Library under the auspices of Best Beginning, I read the instructions all wrong though and read Cards on the Table instead which might not have had the Best Beginning but was still Very Fun.

It begins at an exhibition of snuff boxes, it’s 1936 and Poirot is surrounded by Lovely young Things, the well-dressed languid London crowd. Among them is Mr. Shaitana, a Mephistophelian character with his own set of fine moustaches with stiff waxed ends. He’s a collector who lives richly and beautifully and gives fabulous parties, he’s also a man of whom everyone is a little afraid and at this party he sets out to bait ‘that ridiculous little man’, Poirot. He boasts that he has a collection of the most successful criminals and invites Poirot to dinner where he will exhibit his collection of ‘tigers’ – murderers who have got away with it.

Continue reading “Cards on the Table” →

Classics Club Spin #43

~ Jane ~ 18 Comments

It’s time for the first spin of the year. The rules are to list 20 titles from your Classics Club list by Sunday the 8th February when the numbers will be spun; then read and review the title that corresponds with the spin number by Sunday the 29th March. I haven’t included any chunksters, so a few of the titles are duplicated to give myself every chance for success!

Continue reading “Classics Club Spin #43” →

North and South

~ Jane ~ 28 Comments

Rebellion, acceptance and education are at the core of this brilliant novel.

The Hale family live comfortably in the South of England until the Reverend Hale has a crisis of conscience, he can no longer follow the teachings of the church and decides he must give up his living. His old University friend owns property in the Northern mill town of Milton and offers this to the Hales’. Their daughter Margaret is distraught. The South is sunny and gentle, full of friendly faces, flowers and grass and birds tweeting in the hedgerows, and she’s to give this up for the squalid harshness of The North, from the little she’s heard it sounds cold and grim. And how will her brother Frederick find them? After taking part in a mutiny on board ship he’s now in exile somewhere in the world, if he’s caught he’ll be hanged, how does she get word to him that they’ve had to leave their dear home?

They arrive in the North and it’s everything Margaret feared, perhaps even worse. The mill owner, John Thornton, is a proud haughty individual. He has no time for book learning, from poverty he’s built up his business to be one of the most successful cotton mills around. He lives at the mill with his mother who’s devoted to him because of his success and the power he holds, and his sister who’s devoted to him because of all that he can provide.

Margaret has left the safety of the south with it’s old-world order of land owners and their feudal workers for the new modern world of industrialisation and entrepreneurs, and she finds herself adrift; her haughty demeanour comes into full play when met by the forthright behaviour of the locals who stare at her openly, and speak before being invited too!

Continue reading “North and South” →

Just Watching: His Girl Friday

~ Jane ~ 13 Comments

Now this is Fast and Furious, what a humdinger for the start of the year!

Newspaper editor, Walter Burns (Cary Grant) is furious when his ex-wife and ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) arrives in the newsroom and tells him that she’s giving up reporting to marry sweet but dull insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) and catching the next train to Albany to be a normal wife.

But there’s a big story around town, Earl Williams (John Qualen) is accused of murder and due to be hanged the next morning; is he guilty? will he be hanged? Walter needs his ace-reporter on the job and Hildy wants the scoop. Will she join the bunch of hard boiled reporters in the press office? What about Bruce, his mother (she’s going with them) and the train?

Cue a whirlwind of witty dialogue delivered at lightning speed; pure slapstick mixed with the desperate clicking of typewriter keys and the zhoosh of the carriage return; 1? 2? 3? no, 4 telephones all ringing, all answered, all by Hildy. There’s a jail break, cops chasing and cops being chased, Bruce is being arrested and all the time his mother’s still waiting.

Continue reading “Just Watching: His Girl Friday” →

Lolly Willowes

~ Jane ~ 34 Comments

What a fantastic and surprising start to this year’s reading!

First published in 1926, it all begins so conventionally. A large, comfortable house in the Somerset countryside, filled with Lolly, brothers and parents’ following the traditions set by previous generations of Willowes’ and the brewing business they founded. Then with the death of her mother and her brothers’ leaving home, Lolly continues as housekeeper and much loved daughter to her father. But when he dies the brothers’ decide that Lolly should leave her home and the countryside and move in with her older brother and his family in London.

Good Old Aunt Lolly, she’s very handy with the sewing basket, at looking after nieces and nephews, she can make up numbers at dinner parties and only needs the small guest bedroom. She’s 28 and too inclined to enjoy her own company; definitely a spinster for the shelf.

But behind this conventional beginning there’s been a quiet drip of information that tells us this isn’t the tale we’re expecting. Lolly never calls herself Lolly, she affords herself the respect of being Laura Willowes, and she has a firm interest in the business of brewing, brewing that goes alongside her love of botany.

Botany and flowers, powerful and forgotten herbs, the earth is what she loves; and one day the greengrocer adds a spray of beech leaves to her bouquet; they’re from his sisters’ garden in the Chiltern Hills. Laura finds a map of the Chilterns and arranges her escape to the village of Great Mop.

Continue reading “Lolly Willowes” →

Just Watching A Film: 2026

~ Jane ~ 19 Comments

A new year and a great new list of films To Be Watched! I haven’t seen any of them before, not even the juggernauts that begin and end the year and many of them I hadn’t even heard of; but hopefully as in previous years, there’ll be some corkers and new all time favourites. I think my favourite from last year was, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in October, a work of German Expressionism from Robert Wiene in 1920. Silent and black and white, I don’t think I would have watched it if I hadn’t been encouraged too and it’s brilliant. Nothing from Germany this year but there is some Agnès Varda who’s becoming a fixture, and another classic from Yasujirō Ozu.

January: His Girl Friday (1940, USA)
A newspaper editor manipulates all around him for the sake of a scoop in a classic screwball comedy.

February: Bicycle Thieves (1948, Italy)
The quiet tragedy of a man’s desperate hunt for his stolen bicycle with his son, has a fable-like simplicity. 

March: We Are The Best! (2013, Sweden)
A joyful, exuberant tale of three teenagers discovering punk in the 80’s, in the suburbs of Stockholm

Continue reading “Just Watching A Film: 2026” →

Six Degrees From Frenchman’s Creek

~ Jane ~ 16 Comments

A Happy New Year! and this year I resolve to join in with 6 Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best, on the first Saturday of each month. Kate provides the first title and then we make a chain of 6 titles, linked to the one that went before. This month’s title is the one we finished with in December and for me that was Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek.

It’s a story of adventure and pirates as Lady Dona St. Columb leaves London for Cornwall and swaps gowns for trousers as she begins her new life. Adventure, new beginnings, and trouser wearing provides my first link to Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s brilliantly funny gender bending time warp, that follows Orlando across the centuries, the globe, and from male to female. My favourite part is when she arrives in London after years abroad and spies poets sitting along the Thames.

Continue reading “Six Degrees From Frenchman’s Creek” →