Movies With A Literary Bent

We’ve been watching a lot of movies with a literary bent lately. A few nights ago Miss L and I watched Lawrence of Arabia, a movie I must see at least once a year …

… T.E. Lawrence. An egoist in the desert who becomes a god and loses all sense of himself. What a horrible affliction, like Narcissus discovering that the river has gone dry and there is no other place to gaze upon his own reflection.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Maltese Falcon, another I’ve seen at least a dozen times but this time I paid strict attention to the stark nihilisitc greed of Dashiell Hammett’s fortune seekers, a strange hybrid of pulp fiction and naturalistic writing, like something Frank Norris might produce after meeting Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka for coffee. At Starbucks.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sense and Sensibility. Never viewed the film before and, in fact, I’ve never read Jane Austen. Chick writers of the 19th century. I have some kind of problem with it. I dunno what it is. Anyway, the movie: What a splendid and at times disgusting study of class, of human sensibilities, as the title implies, and what, in the end, is sensible and reasonable by applying contemporary moral and ethical standards. I mean, for God’s sake, as Miss L pointed out, the Colonel had to hang around and wait to be chosen as second best.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By the way, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was first published on this date in 1925. To this day, almost 30 years after first reading the novel and reconsidering it a few more times over the years, I still ponder if perhaps it isn’t indeed the fabled Great American Novel. Some scholars argue to the contrary, allowing that Nick Carraway is a classic “unreliable narrator” (because he dares to have opinions about those of whom he speaks).

I long ago gave up waiting for a definitive screen version of Fitzgerald’s dark story of love and the Horatio Alger myth. I don’t think it’s ever going to happen.