One of the movies that's on my DVR and is coming up on TCM in the near future is Sweet November, which gets its next TCM showing tomorrow (Nov. 17) at 6:00 PM. So I watched it in order to be able to do a post on it.
Anthony Newley plays Charlie Blake, a British-born businessman trying to bring the family's box-manufacturing business to America. As the movie begins, he's been in the States for three years, but never got a New York driver's license, which is why he's at the DMV in Manhattan to take his written driver's test now that the old license expired. The DMV administers the test a bunch of times a day to a room full of people, and sitting behind Charlie is the frankly obnoxious Sara Deever (Sandy Dennis). Sara keeps asking Charlie if he knows the answers to the questions on the test, and the proctor dings Charlie for cheating, throwing him out of the exam room!
In real life, this would be enough for a normal person to want to be rid of a malign presences like Sara. But Sweet November is a movie, so Sara bumps into Charlie after the test and takes him to a hot dog stand for lunch despite his just wanting her to give him directions so he can eat alone in peace. Sara takes Charlie to a park bench so they can eat their lunch, and starts asking him questions that are way too personal. Sara gave me vibes of the Liza Minnelli character in The Sterile Cuckoo, although I think Sweet November was released first.
Sara eventually invites Charlie over to her apartment in Brooklyn, and it's there that she has an odd proposition for him. Sara is a bohemian who finds a different man every month who she thinks is in need of some sort of TLC, and offers each of the men the chance to have a one-month relationship with her before going on to the next man to "fix". Charlie is in Sara's eyes obviously way too conventional and strait-laced, so she'd like him to live with her for November and maybe get a different view of life.
Amazingly, Charlie says "yes" to all this and acts like he's just going to take a month out of life even though he's got a business to run and is supposed to go up to Toronto for a big business meeting that he just blows off. And he doesn't tell any of his underlings where he really is. None of this makes any sense, but as I said a few paragraphs back, this is a movie, not real life.
Charlie also doesn't seem to have any friends in his personal life despite having been in the States for three years while Sara only seems to have neighbor Alonzo (Theodore Bikel). But despite all this, Charlie falls in love with Sara, and would like to stay with her past the end of November! He senses there's something wrong, however, and Alonzo tells him the secret as to why Sara is the way she is and why Charlie shouldn't want to stay after the end of the month. Will the couple stay together?
The big problem I had with Sweet November is, well, twofold. One is that Sara is just such an irritating character (not Sandy Dennis' fault, of course). In addition to The Sterile Cuckoo I mentioned above, I was also thinking of Barbra Streisand in The Owl and the Pussycat, a movie I hated mostly because of the sociopathic nature of the Streisand character. The other problem is that the script has no bearing in reality. Charlie is just going to drop his business for an entire month? And none of these people really know anyone in spite of having been in New York all this time?
Some people obviously liked Sweet November, however. It had enough fans that somebody thought at the beginning of the current century that a remake would be in order. I haven't seen the remake. But give the original a try and judge for yourself; you may be one of the people who likes it too.
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