THE CIDER HOUSE RULES

THE CIDER HOUSE RULES

N.B.  The discussion is all SPOILER ALERTS.

In this coming of age tale young Homer Wells proves he’s grown up by his willingness to perform an abortion, something he had always refused to do in the illegal abortion clinic where he previously worked  —  and where as an orphan he had grown up.  He is helped to this choice by the fact that the woman involved is someone he knows and that she is impregnated by her own father, someone he, and the audience, have liked.

Also shown as maturing on his part is his willingness to destroy the long-standing rules posted on the wall in the cider house where he and his fellow orchard workers live and sleep.  He is told to destroy them by his fellows and he obeys.  He is the only white in the otherwise black crew.

When the father attempts to stop his daughter from absconding, she knifes him and leaves.  Homer agrees, on the father’s insistence, not to give him any medical help.  This also appears to be a part of Homer’s coming of age, along with agreeing not to tell the police what happened.

Homer comes honestly by his resentment of authority.  He grew up in a small rural hospital that is a front for an abortion clinic.  Its one doctor (Michael Caine) and his two nurses lead a life of lies and are always concealing facts from their board of trustees.

The owner of the orchard where Homer has gone to work after leaving the hospital has a son away in the army.  His fianceé is on hand, staying with his mother, and she sees to Homer’s sexual coming of age.  She needs sex while her intended is in combat and uses Homer who falls in love with her.  To her credit, when the soldier returns paralyzed, she accepts him.  The fiancée is played by Charlize Theron, soon to become a formidable actress.

Critics have called this film glowing, “warm,” “loving” !  This perception may have to do with the performance by Tobey Maguire who is perfectly cast and whose charm survives all the corruption and betrayal and death of the script.

From the novel by John Irving

THE CIDER HOUSE RULES        Lasse Halström        1999

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MOVIES ARE EVERYWHERE

Yes, they are, including in good novels.  In Paul Auster’s latest novel Baumgartner, the wife of the narrator is fed up with what the ceiling fans in the office where she works do to her hair.   ” . . . but what a hideous tangle those fans wrought on the uppermost parts of a girl’s head, so I marched into a hairdresser’s place on the first Saturday I had off, showed the stylist a photograph of Jean Seberg in Breathless, then another one of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, and told her to split the difference between the two.”

Paul Auster.  Baumgartner.  Grove Press, 2023.

NEXT FRIDAY POST February 23

Until then,
Enjoy a movie,
Rick

MORE SHORT TAKES

NEVADA SMITH        Henry Hathaway        1966

This is an improbable but engrossing revenge tale  —  engrossing, though Nevada Smith does take a long time running to earth the three men who savagely, gleefully murdered his parents.  (SPOILER ALERT):  His decision to leave the third and final man alive, with two shattered knee caps and begging to be killed, is a startling surprise.

McQueen is especially good in the early scenes in which he shows his character’s naiveté about the world outside his own.

With Arthur Kennedy, Karl Malden and, for some odd reason, a dubbed Raf Vallone.

ALMOST FAMOUS        Cameron Crowe        2008

Loud and hectic and too long, but the character of the underage journalist with integrity is original and intriguing.  Billy Crudup is well cast and good.  Frances McDormand as the young journalist’s mother is excellent.  Kate Hudson and Patrick Fugit (as the boy) are outstanding.

Screenplay by Cameron Crowe.

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MOVIES ARE EVERYWHERE

In John Knowles’ novel Indian Summer, Lynn leaves home.  Well, not exactly home.  She has been visiting her sister at the home of the sister’s new in-laws who are about to give a huge party which Lynn does not want to attend.  And she wants anyway to end her visit at the big home of the family, High Farms.  She wants to be “. . . where the movie houses seemed the kind of palaces she loved, so much more magical than a real house like High Farms, movie palaces with their functionless theater boxes, tormented Vatican pillars lining the lobbies, rococo balconies encrusted with crust, lost Arabian courtyards featuring one drinking fountain, fake stars winking from the satiny ceiling; above all, their huge screens, where she could watch huge people doing huge things and be happy until the arid moment when the lights came on and she had to withdraw into her own undersized self again and step back onto the bleak, unintelligible treadmill called real life.”

John Knowles.  Indian Summer.  Random House, 1966.

NEXT FRIDAY POST November 10

Until then,
Enjoy a movie,
Rick

ROY RIDES AGAIN PLUS “MOVIES ARE EVERYWHERE”

 

PURSUED BY A BEAR

PALS OF THE GOLDEN WEST    William Witney    1951

This was Roy Rogers’s last Republic film, marking his transition to television star.  The plot hinges on the Mexican border and the American border patrol.  American cattle rustlers are bringing hoof and mouth disease into the United States along with their stolen steers.  William Witney gets to use his standard cattle shot of the same cattle moving this way, that way, up or down that small hill which stands in for countless locations.  But overall he gives us his usual outdoor shooting with a minimum of process shots.

Highlights:

Roy, using the backs of two hitched horses, runs across them to resume his fistfight;

Pinky Lee traps two rustlers in a cattle chute (Otherwise Lee is a true trial for the viewer as Hollywood was still using in 1942 the today-unfunny sidekick);

Dale Evans, in a sometimes unsympathetic role, exhibits some of the versatility of her earlier days before her type-casting.

“Pursued by a bear”  —  William Shakespeare’s best known stage direction  —  gets put to use here when the son of a border patrol friend gets chased by a bear of less than believable ferocity, shot through branches, in reduced light.

MOVIES ARE EVERYWHERE

. . .  including South African Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise.

“In his line of work there are a lot of nasty operators, some of whom he employs.  He thinks of himself as a tough guy and he’s certainly no innocent, he’s had to cauterise the sensitive side of his nature, which would otherwise let him down.  He works out three times a week and has a black belt in karate and is fond of watching Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood play vigilantes.”  (New York, Europa Editions, 2021.)

RECOMMENDED READING

‘WEST SIDE STORY’ AND THE DECLINE OF THE BIJOU by Peggy Noonan, an article in the New York Times of 12//18/21.  Noonan writes of seeing the film at the AMC theater in New York with a small audience.  She looks tellingly at what we have lost in no longer going to the movies.  Summarizing or paraphrasing could never do justice to her short essay.  Please read it.

COMING SOON

“The Judy Watch”

Rick’s Flicks will serialize The Judy Watch by Harry Richards, a study of the live concerts by film star Judy Garland.

Next FRIDAY Post April 22

Until then,
Enjoy a movie,
Go safely to a movie,
Rick

MOVIES ARE EVERYWHERE

Top Gun is a terrible movie.

The Godfather is boring.

Sasha and Dyson, her best friend from childhood, have teamed up and established a program for the rehabilitation of troubled men.  In an effort to get their resident campers to evaluate themselves, they distribute a handout consisting of a list of things the men need to know.  Two things they need to know are that Top Gun is a terrible movie and that The Godfather is boring.

Sasha and Dyson are characters in the_atmospherians a novel by Alex McElroy.  (Atria Books.  New York, 2021)

So, Rick’s Flicks does not consider Top Gun a terrible movie.  It is, in fact, a finely edited one.  And while The Godfather(s) may belong among the most overrated Hollywood films of all time, they are not boring.

Another statement is from a coloring book the troubled men use: “Violence as the sole means of communication and bonding.”  Here the novel, without intending it,  makes a succinct expression of a lot of American movie history  —  years and decades of American movie history.  Think of how many movie friendships are initiated, how many conflicts finally resolved, how many wrongs righted by a fistfight.

A fistfight concludes some of the most highly regarded films  —  some of your favorites.

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Roy Rogers

Interesting sidebar:  Roy Rogers, in his films, is not good at fistfighting.  He is invabriably losing until the last moments bring victory.

NEXT FRIDAY POST July 30.

Until then,
Consider film fistfights,
Enjoy a movie,
Rick

ALICE FAYE IN LAS CASAS

“The programme at the cinema was supposed to start at nine, but . . .”

It is spring of 1938 and Graham Greene is in Las Casas, Mexico where he is commissioned to write about the religious situation:

At last the Queen [of the Spring Fair] climbed onto the stage with her maids and courtiers, buxom and brown-eyed and gold-toothed.  The girls sat on hard straight chairs in front of an absurd Edwardian drawing room set of cardboard tables and cut-out ferns . . . A poet read an ode into a microphone, the brothers Something-or-Other played interminably on the marimba, and somebody made an oration on the petroleum situation. . . Then there was another speech and more marimba playing and a raffle for free cinema seats which went on for half an hour, and at last the great film, specially brought to Las Casas for the Spring Fair:  Warner Baxter and Alice Faye in a faded backstage musical.  Incomprehensible situations passed across a flickery screen, the lights of Broadway, complicated renunciations.  They became more than ever fantastic translated into Spanish.  The audience never laughed once; they sat in silence.  Only the Queen of the Fair sometimes smiled. . . Alice Faye’s fair and unformed face was projected in enormous detail, weeping enormous tears; her man had failed, taken to drink, while she was featured over Broadway in neon signs and wept for lost love.  This was a stigmata they couldn’t understand, but I was grateful for the darkness and the torch songs. . .    The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene.  William Heinemann, 1939.)

 

Do any of my readers/followers recognize the film Graham Greene saw in Mexico?

COMING SOON

Two Students of Prague

The Student of Prague (1913)

The Student of Prague (1926)

Next FRIDAY Post May 28

Until then,
Enjoy a movie!
Rick