J A N E T I L I T Y

“I think if old Saint Valentine but knew

The way his fête-day’s now commemorated

And if the strange productions met his view

That fill our picture-shops, at any rate, he’d

Be much amused and no doubt marvel, too,

At fame, he surely scarce anticipated.”

From St Valentine’s Day, Mary Eliza Rogers, 1851

Among the strange productions of Valentine’s Day are the annual compilations of the best romantic films, so instead of the usual candidates – Sleepless in Seattle and The Notebook, for example – I’ve chosen ten very good romantic films for my belated Valentine’s Day post: some of them are funny, some sobering, some bittersweet and many unjustly overlooked.

Hudson and Lolabrigida

10. Come September(1961)– An absolutely delightful romantic comedy showcasing Rock Hudson’s underappreciated comedic gifts. Hudson plays an American tycoon, who spends his Septembers at his Italian villa with his Italian mistress. He arrives in July to find that his mistress is engaged, his steward has been renting out the villa to American tourists, and the current guests are a gaggle of teenage girls. When their chaperone is injured, Hudson winds up looking after the young charges, counseling them on propriety and virtue while trying to win back his lady love. Co-starring Gina Lollabrigida, Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin, who performs his 1961 hit, Multiplication.

9. Electric Dreams (1984) – A 20^thcentury, high tech (for the era) Cyrano, with the three points of the love triangle being the socially awkward architect

Von Dohlen and Madsen

 Miles (Lenny von Dohlen), the pretty cellist upstairs, Madeline (Virginia Madsen) and Miles’s home computer, “Edgar”. Miles loves Madeline, Madeline loves the duettist who accompanies her through the air ducts, unaware that it is not Miles, but Edgar, and Edgar begins to develop “feelings” for Madeline. The technology may be dated, but the performances are fresh and unpretentious, the musical score is vintage 80s and a nod must go to Bud Cort as the voice of Edgar.

Sheedy and LaPaglia

8. Betsy’s Wedding  (1990) – Free-spirit aspiring designer Betsy (Molly Ringwald) is marrying buttoned-down banker Jake (Dylan Walsh). Wackiness ensues. This would be no more than a pleasant ensemble comedy except for an utterly charming subplot that involves the budding romance between Betsy’s cop sister and a mobster’s nephew Stevie Dee (Anthony LaPaglia who is terrific). His dogged, formal courtship is both touching and hilarious (“I have the highest respect for your father. Do you think he would be offended if I requested your permission for a kiss good-night.”) Ally Sheedy turns in a very sweet performance as the object of his affection.

Cagney and Day

7. Love Me Or Leave Me(1955) – This is not a hearts-and-flowers lighthearted comedy, but an earnest biopic of torch singer Ruth Etting and her turbulent marriage to manager/mobster Martin Synder (James Cagney). The ambitious, long-suffering Etting is beautifully played – and sung – by Doris Day, and the volatile relationship is treated with remarkable frankness. The film was nominated for six Oscars, including one for Cagney’s performance, though, unaccountably, not Day’s. It won for best story.

Baker and Lathan

6. Something New(2006) – Wealthy, upscale Kenya McQueen (Sanaa Lathan) is moving up the corporate ladder. Brian (Simon Baker) left the corporate world for the blue-collar life of a landscaper. The social and economic differences would have been enough for a love-against-obstacles romantic comedy, but the added hurdle is that Kenya is black and Brian is white. An interracial romance – particularly in a romantic comedy walks a fine line: it either risks being preachy by hammering the racial issue, or being too saccharine in pretending it’s not an issue at all. Screenwriter Kriss Turner and director Sanaa Hamri get it just right. Not a weak link in the cast; Earl Billings is especially charming as Kenya’s pragmatic father.

5. Two for the Road(1967) – This bittersweet tale of a decade in a marriage was ahead of its time for its non-linear storytelling. Instead of a

Hepburn and Finney

chronological narrative, the romance and betrayal, exhilaration and trials of Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) and Mark (Albert Finney) are told through a series of road trips that occur during stress points in their marriage. Even after forty years, the film still has a very contemporary feel, and thanks to the assured direction of Stanley Donen and editing of Madeleine Gug and Richard Marden, and the score may be Henry Mancini’s best.

D'Onofrio and Tomei

4. Happy Accidents (2000) – Ruby (Marisa Tomei) has a habit of picking fixer-uppers who let her down. Along comes Sam (Vincent D’Onofrio) who is sweet and devoted and the perfect man except for his claim to be a “backtraveler” from the year 2470. Is he from the future, or hopelessly delusional, and, if he’s the perfect man for Ruby, does it matter? Writer, director and editor Brad Anderson deftly meshes romance, mystery, suspense and time travel into an original take on the modern love story.

3. The Whole Wide World (1996) – This was the last small film that Renee Zellweger made before Jerry Maguire. Based on One Who Walked Alone, the

D'Onofrio and Zellweger

memoir of Novalyne Price, The Whole Wide Worldrecounts Price’s time as a Depression-era Texas schoolteacher, and her friendship and budding romance with prolific fantasy writer Robert E. Howard (Vincent D’Onofrio). Many romantic films follow the pairing of two eccentrics; here, there is only one, “this morose, ungainly misfit among men”, and the woman who is pragmatic enough to know that there is no future, yet romantic enough to hold out hope a bit too long. Beautifully directed by Dan Ireland; D’Onofrio deserved a lot more recognition for this performance.

Tomei and Molina

2. The Perez Family (1995) – After 20 years in a Cuban prison, Juan Raul Perez (Alfred Molina) is released and is dispatched to Miami with a group of Marielitos, and to a hoped-for reunion with his wife and daughter. To expedite the process, Perez agrees to form a “family” with the spirited Dorita Perez (Marisa Tomei) and two other Perezes in order to get priority placement with a sponsor. The problem? Perez’s wife, Carmela is comfortably Americanized and involved with a charming police detective, and Perez finds himself falling in love with Dorita.

1. Crossing Delancey (1988) – It baffles me that Crossing Delancey is overlooked when people are listing their favorite romantic comedies. It is a fresh, witty, winning tale of the romantic complications of a thirtysomething Manhattanite, predating Sex and the Cityby a decade, and far more engaging. Izzy Grossman lives uptown, plans author events for an upscale independent bookstore and is infatuated with a European novelist. Her Lower East Side grandmother thinks it’s time Izzy found a nice Jewish husband. She engages the local matchmaker and the two old ladies set their sights on Sam, the neighborhood pickle vendor.
   

   Riegert (The Pickle Man!) and Irving

   Izzy rejects their efforts and tries to foist Sam off on one of her friends while pursuing the novelist, only to figure out that grandma knew best after all. The scenes between Reizl Bozyk, as the grandmother, and Sylvia Miles as the matchmaker are hilarious, the script is sophisticated and clever, and there are probably women who still think of Peter Riegert and “the pickle man”.

Sherlock: A Case of Evil was a 2002 made-for-television film that pits a twentysomething Sherlock Holmes (James D’Arcy) against his nemesis, Moriarty and I will state from the outset that, of the few portrayals of a younger Sherlock Holmes, James D’Arcy’s is, by far, the best. Everything about his performance (including the “look” which I consider to be indispensable) is pitch-perfect.

James D'Arcy = Young Sherlock Holmes

A Case of Evil begins with the upshot of an investigation that has Holmes  pursuing Moriarty through London; there is a confrontation, Holmes shoots Moriarty and the body falls into the river. The effect of this – as Moriarty is known to be a master criminal – is to make an instant celebrity of the young detective and Holmes revels in fame, and it’s perks. Depicting Holmes as an attention-loving and arrogant young luminary (when a policeman asks for his surname, he replies. “Holmes.” [pause] “With an L”) is an interesting notion and, in its way, Canonical. Early in their Canonical relationship, Watson is irked by Holmes’s “bumptious style of conversation”, and looks upon the detective’s swift deductions as “brag and bounce”; when Holmes explains his chain of reasoning, he is “pleased at [Watson’s] evident surprise and admiration”.

We see a hint of the self-conceit in the earliest – chronologically, speaking – case, The Gloria Scott, when the college-age Holmes forms a friendship with fellow student who is “the very opposite to me in most respects”, and pays a visit to the young man and his father. Urged to demonstrate his deductive powers, Holmes leads with the observation that is guaranteed to shock and impress. In A Case of Evil, we have the same hint of swagger, and the same readiness to perform his deductive parlor tricks.

What Piers Ashworth’s screenplay posits (some odd casting and plotting choices notwithstanding*) is that, as a young man, Sherlock Holmes was engaging, vain, energetic, and emotionally susceptible. As the story plays out, we learn that Moriarty’s “death” and the case that precipitated it had been a ruse. In flashbacks, we see that Holmes has a personal grudge against Moriarty’s, and the resolution of the case costs a young woman, of whom Holmes has become quite fond, her life. The screenplay endorses the theory that the Sherlockian self-control, aloofness, detachment toward women are not fundamental traits, but the assumed, an armor against suffering. Even in the later cases, we often witness emotion and reason at odds; more than once, Watson comments on his friend’s vanity and reserve,  thoughtlessness and chivalry, his impatience and generosity. Like Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet, Holmes is “so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice.”

 While the script does a very credible job in formulating a young Sherlock Holmes, it does tend to stray in other areas. Watson, here, is a rather unsophisticated police surgeon (and there seems to be a confusion about the era’s distinction between surgeon and doctor), to whom Holmes is introduced in the course of an investigation; yet, it has Holmes already living at Baker Street. (Sherlockians will recognize the inaccuracy). There is no sense that Watson is a man of worldly experience; there are, however, the glimpses of “pawky humor”, as when Holmes observed that there is “something abnormal about [a corpse’s] windpipe”, and Watson replies, “Yes. Normally, he’d be using it to breathe.”

Roger Morlidge as Watson

The humor extends to the script’s wry social jabs that offer “a distinct touch”. Holmes is hired by a wealthy opium importer whose clients are being killed off. Holmes – whose drugs of choice here are alcohol, including absinthe, and, of course, tobacco – despises both the client and drug use, an abhorrence that is explained in flashbacks. The gentleman rationalizes his occupation: opiates, he claims, are a “social necessity” for war veterans who have been introduced to morphine at battlefield hospitals and who continue to have “a taste for the drug” when they return.

Moriarty, who is at the root of the murders, scorns the importer for “building a criminal empire on a product that isn’t even illegal”, predicting that the real profits will come when drugs are prohibited, and that “They’re going to love it over there” (i.e., in America). Conversely, Watson, disparages Holmes’s use of tobacco, predicting that cigarettes will soon be banned by the government, while opium and cocaine, having medicinal uses, will always be legal.

Added to the interesting social landscape is the pulp reporter who dogs Holmes for headlines with all the tenacity of a paparazzo, shrugging off Lestrade’s challenge to his accuracy with, “We can always print a retraction next week.” Young Holmes is an assiduous collector of his own press clippings until the account assembled in his scrapbook becomes too personal and painful a record. Then, he decides, “I’d rather trust posterity to that diary of yours, Watson.”

*Re: the odd casting choices. Vincent D’Onofrio is Moriarty. Richard E. Grant (who was always on my Sherlock shortlist) is Mycroft. Perhaps they should have considered reversing the roles?

Vincent D'Onofrio as Moriarty

Richard E. Grant as Mycroft

And which Austen character would have enjoyed A Case of Evil? It is hard to believe that any of the young ladies of high sensibility – Catherine Morland, Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse, Maria and Julia Bertram, the Musgrove sisters or even the frivolous Charlotte Palmer – could resist this handsome, dashing version of Sherlock Holmes, and perhaps Jane herself who, in one of her letters, writes of having “the dignity of dropping out my mother’s Laudanum” would have wondered at Moriarty’s notion that the such a common remedy would ever be made illegal.

 And three degrees of Austen? James D’Arcy had the starring role in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2001) with Tom Hollander, who was Mr. Collins in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice.