Change Your Image
edsevern
Reviews
A Gift to Last (1976)
A wonderful story
Just a bit more trivia about this wonderful story.
It was shown just before Xmas one year and then was replayed the next Xmas, and the TV series followed a few months later.
The great Melvyn Douglas had a role in the back-story. He plays the present-day Clement Sturgess, the character who is a small boy during the days of the Boer War and is enamored of his gregarious Uncle Edgar, played by Gordon Pinsent. Uncle Edgar helps young Clement learn how to appreciate his emotionally-distant father.
I believe that Gordon Pinsent also wrote and sang the theme song.
I would love to find this on DVD.
Adventure (1945)
Garson puts the able in Gable; Gable puts the arson in Garson
Those were alternate tag lines that MGM offered to Greer Garson when she complained about "Gable's back and Garson's got him".
This really is a wonderful movie, but perhaps a bit hard to understand after only one viewing. It certainly wasn't what the public was expecting in 1945/6. After seeing it several times I find it just gets better and better.
Gable chews up scenery, knocks down doors, punches a few guys, and kisses some beautiful women, all because he is fed up with life and with the sorry state of mankind. When he meets Greer, he backs her up against a library shelf to intimidate her but she doesn't budge. He can't understand why this "tomato" doesn't fall for his rough charm the way most women do. It takes him the whole movie to realize that Greer is exactly what he's been looking for all along.
Greer is first repulsed by Gable, then fascinated, then jealous of Joan Blondell, eventually infatuated with him, and finally resigned to losing him to the sea and to his quest for the elusive quality that he calls "it". His pal Thomas Mitchell realizes that she is just what Gable needs.
Garson and Gable are great together. If you're a fan of either, then you'll need to see this movie.
And you'll learn neat stuff like how to mesmerize a chicken and how inexpensive groceries were in 1945.
You'll even get to see Greer imitating a rooster. It's almost as good as her sea lion imitation in "Julia Misbehaves".
Remember? (1939)
A must-see for fans of Greer or Taylor; ho-hum otherwise
(Small spoilers) If you're a fan of Greer Garson (like me) or Robert Taylor (like me) you'll need to see this movie. If you're not a fan, you'll find the first forty minutes to be brilliant but the rest tiresome.
This was Greer Garson's second film, and she's still young and beautiful here, with the full MGM glamour treatment. You can see that she hasn't perfected her acting skills yet; she does that next year in "Pride and Prejudice".
Robert Taylor is delightful in the first half. Yes, he does steal Lew Ayres' fiancée, but Greer is hard to resist. Lew Ayres' character resigns himself to this fate rather easily, having obviously endured it from his friend many times in the past. Taylor is very funny when he gets startled several times. Greer and Taylor are wonderful together, even more so than they are two years later in "When Ladies Meet".
If you're not a fan of either of these two, you'll still enjoy the first half of this movie. There are plenty of gags, funny lines, and good ideas; you could fill a whole web page with the hilarious things that Billie Burke gets to say.
But after the popular surprise-party sequence, everything slows down; the movie could actually end at this point. There is no dramatic need for anything else to happen: up until this point Lew Ayres has never shown any desire to get Greer back. It's not even clear to me why he bothers to slips them the drug, other than to help them forget their misery.
After eighty minutes, the movie ends very abruptly with Greer speaking a line that makes absolutely no sense. This one line will leave you shaking your head and wondering why you bothered with this movie. But go back and watch the first half again.
As I said, if you're a fan, then watch it. Otherwise, if you come across this movie somewhere, watch until the surprise party scene and then be kind and rewind.