84, Charing Cross Road

Back in 1987, one of the movies that I hear about getting a release, but never got the chance to watch because I wasn't really in a place to go to the local mall sixtyplex by myself was 84 Charing Cross Road. Over the years, I'd heard other people say some really good things about it, and it was one of those films I'd wanted to see. So when TCM ran it last August when Anne Bancroft was honored in Summer Under the Stars, I finally got the chance to record it and watch it.

I had known that the movie was based on an epistolary novel, but what I didn't realize is that it's actually based on a true story. Helene Hanff (played by Bancroft) is a woman who, as the movie opens, is getting on a plane to London. A big part of her visit is to get to the titular 84, Charing Cross Road (no comma in the title of the movie but apparently there is in the title of the book), which was the home of used book store Marks & Co. She gets there to find that the store is closed and workmen are renovating it into something else. But as with the opening of Twelve O'Clock High, this is a chance for all those old memories to come back....

Flash back to 1949. Helene Hanff is a research writer/script editor working in New York and living in the sort of apartment filled with books. She needs more books for her work, and is having a dickens of a time finding them in New York. In the Saturday Review of Literature, she sees an ad for Marks & Co., and decides to write to them to see if they have the books she needs. That letter is answered by Frank Doel (Anthony Hopkins), who fills the order and starts both a tab for Hanff and a long running correspondence between the two.

Helene responds, in some ways coming across as the character Bancroft played in Garbo Talks: the quintessential New York stereotype of a person who won't back down and do things her own way. The two also talk about their personal lives. Hanff is single, while Frank has a wife Nora (Judi Dench) and two daughters. Eventually, one of Frank's co-workers writes to Helene as well, and everybody in the store is interested in Helene, with the interest being mutual as the movie in part becomes a sort of retrospective of life for a certain class of British person over the course of 20 years.

Frank and the rest of the people in the store hope that perhaps Helene can make it to London some day, although this is the early 1950s when transatlantic travel is very expensive. Helene does make plans to get over to the UK, but financial issues keep coming up to prevent it. She has a friend who does stage acting and gets a part in a touring company that will be going to London. But when she goes to Marks & Co., she doesn't recognize Frank. The correspondence goes on, until.... Well, we know that Helene does make it to London but only after the store went out of business.

84 Charing Cross Road is the sort of movie that you'd think would have a tough time working, from the idea of adapting letters into a good movie to the fact that the two main characters never meet. And yet the movie is something very charming, thanks in part to Bancroft's very American performance and Hopkins' very British performance. Perhaps for people who are more used to current-day movies from the 2020s, 84 Charing Cross Road may seem a bit old-fashioned and tough to get into. But for anyone who likes classic film, I think they'll very much enjoy it.