This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're out of October, so no more horror themes for a while. Instead, we get a theme called "Bookish Movies". Now, I didn't think this was a theme about book-to-movie adaptations, since I'm pretty certain we've done that before. After a bit of thought, I came up with three movies with different types of people who could be considered bookish:
Fast Company (1938). Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice plays Joel and Garda Sloane, a married couple who are sellers of rare books, with Joel making more money by finding stolen books and returning them for the insurance reward. One of those cases leads to a man being murdered, and Joel and Garda start playing Nick and Nora Charles.
Storm Center (1956). Bette Davis plays a spinster librarian who's an insititution in her medium-sized town. But she's also created controversy by keeping a book on her shelf that argues in favor of communism, saying she kept Mein Kampf on the shelves back in the 1930s so people could read and judge for themselves. One little boy idolizes her, and when his dad tells him she may be a Communist, the boy goes nuts, which is funniest part of the movie, which is nowhere near as brave as it might make itself out to be.
The Best of Everything (1959). Hope Lange plays the new member of the secretarial pool at a New York publishing house. The secretaries have various adventures, while Lange looks up to spinster editor Joan Crawford, who's about as nasty here as her character in Torch Song was. Lange's hoping to become a reader and then maybe an editor. Other editors are played by Stephen Boyd and Brian Aherne, while the secretaries include Diane Baker and Suzy Parker.
5 comments:
Great picks!
Fast Company is a breezy little programmer and Storm Center a little something unusual for Bette but I LOVE The Best of Everything in all its soapy absurdity.
I'm having computer issues this week so while I have three I'm relying on the Google synopsis for clarity.
The Book Club (2018)-Four friends' (Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen) lives are turned upside down when their book club tackles the infamous "50 Shades of Grey." From discovering new romance to rekindling old flames, they inspire each other to make their next chapter the best chapter.
The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)-Quirky dog-lover Jocelyn and many-time married Bernadette decide to start a book club exclusively dedicated to Jane Austen, primarily to help distract their friend Sylvia from the fact that her husband has just dumped her. Frustrated French teacher Prudie, Sylvia's daughter Allegra and sci-fi fan Grigg join up as well.
The Pillow Book (1996)-Nagito has a fetish for calligraphy on the human body and meets ideal soul-mate Jerome, an English translator sent to Japan. However, once Nagiko's father's gay publisher rejoins the scene, the story is overtaken by treachery and bloodlust.
Haven't seen any of these, but Fast Company sounds great.
I'm 0/3 on your picks as well. Storm Center catches my eye for Bette Davis
Joel: The Best of Everything made me think of Valley of the Dolls, only set against the world of books. There's also shades of Three Coins in the Fountain/The Pleasure Seekers in there, I think.
Dell: Fast Company is fun, like almost all of those 30s husband/wife detective movies, but somehow not quite as good as The Thin Man. (Even William Powell's movies like The Ex-Mrs. Bradford or Star of Midnight don't quite stack up to The Thin Man.) There were two further movies in the series, with different actors playing the Sloans each time: Fast and Loose with Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell, and Fast and Furious with Franchot Tone and Ann Sothern. The three movies are available together on a Warner Archive box set.
I have not seen any of these and would love to. I like Melvyn Douglas and that first sounds like a breezy comedy to me. The Bette Davis film sounds like fun and who doesn’t want to see soapsy 50s flicks.
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