My Movie Pick

My pick for this February is a story of romance and heartbreak that I’ve watched time and time again for its nuanced performances, lavish period detail, and superb pacing and tension shaped by director William Wyler. The film is The Heiress, based on a play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, in turn based on the Henry James novel Washington Square.

At the heart of the story is a young woman, Catherine Sloper, who has always been considered dull and clumsy by her father, a well-heeled Washington Square doctor who remembers Catherine’s deceased mother as a beauty with charm and grace. Catherine seems to accept her shortcomings and the mantle of disappointment until she encounters a handsome stranger at her cousin’s engagement party. Morris Townsend attends to her as if she were the only girl in the world and, before long, she is utterly smitten by this young man who lives in high style but is essentially penniless. Dr. Sloper is immediately suspicious of Townsend’s intentions, seeing him as a worthless opportunist with an eye on Catherine’s fortune. Add into this mix a visiting aunt who acts as a chaperone to Catherine, but who believes that a one-sided love can be better than no love at all.

Olivia de Havilland inhabits the role of Catherine and she’s wonderful to watch. At first anxious and hesitant, apologetic and submissive, we see her bloom under Morris Townsend’s attentions. De Havilland won the Academy Award and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for her performance. Although Montgomery Clift as Morris never felt that this was one of his best performances, he brings to the fortune-hunter not only an incredible handsomeness but a kind of puppy-like vulnerability that we can believe would melt Catherine’s heart. Ralph Richardson’s Dr. Sloper is believable and chilling, and Miriam Hopkins as the giddy aunt turns in one of her best performances. Edith Head’s costumes also won an Academy Award that year – as did Aaron Copland’s original music score. Director William Wyler was nominated along with cinematographer Leo Tover.

So…yes, it’s hard to imagine a valentine package with more treasures. But remember that this is a Henry James story – and in a box of James chocolates, there are no soft centres.

My Book Pick

I do believe that books can have a seasonal aspect to them. Some novels beg for a summer – or winter – reading. I’ve just finished reading Geraldine McCaughrean’s White Darkness, which unfolds mostly across the icescape of Antarctica and, while I’ll chat about this book because I’ve just finished reading it, it’s actually one you might want to reserve for those overheated summer days filled with the sounds of fans running and ice cubes clinking in whatever drink you have in hand. It seems to me I kept running and putting on sweaters whenever I picked up McCaughrean’s prize-winning book (Michael L. Printz 2008 Award).

And I picked it up whenever I had a spare moment! In this tale of a fourteen-year-old, Sym, who jumps at the chance to go on an excursion to Paris with her uncle, Victor (not a blood relative but a friend of the family who stepped into the breech with the death of Sym’s father), it’s pretty impossible not to be caught up in events that spiral across the globe and into icy encounters that will leave you gasping for air. Uncle Victor is convinced there is spot at the southern pole in which it is possible to disappear into an alternate subterranean world – something Jules Verne had figured out in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, only he got the location wrong.

Sym realizes she has been groomed to be Uncle Victor’s companion on this journey and she’s thankful that she has the close friendship of Titus Oates who accompanied Scott on his last expedition to the South Pole. As she says in the opening lines of the book: I have been in love with Tits Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he’s been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I’ll be dead too, and then the age difference won’t matter.

McCaughrean can be very funny as she follows Sym on an adventure filled not only with a ghost but a motley crew of tourists to the ice-cap and a Norwegian film-making duo who aren’t exactly what they at first seem to be. But she can also write exquisitely about this subcontinent with its sculptured ice and shifting glacial shelves and iridescent snow. Mostly I think I’m envious of the imaginative tour de force she’s pulled off in a narrative that blends a clear-eyed history of polar exploration and exacting geographical detail with a cast of wonderful dysfunctional characters.

Has McCaughrean filled me with a desire to visit Antarctica? No. But she’s filled me with a desire to seek and find some of the other novels she’s written (which include  the 1988 Carnegie medal-winner A Pack of Lies and 3 Whitbread award-winners – A Little Lower Than the Angels, Gold Dust, and Not the End of the World).