CSotD: A clean well-lighted film
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Dave Kellett delivers one right into my wheelhouse with today's Sheldon.
"Authenticity" and "filth" have become one-and-the-same in Hollywood, and logic, romance and storytelling be damned. I don't mind a little smut in a movie, but I hate gratuitous filth.
Unlike Arthur, I was warned off "Waterworld" in time, but I've seen clips, and it's certainly not the only example of the phenomenon, nor is it the most illogical.
(Okay, covered with filth in the middle of the ocean is probably, indeed, the most illogical. But it's not the only example. How's that?)
For instance, in the old, classic Westerns, everything was dry and, except for someone coming off a six-month cattle drive, everyone was relatively clean. In modern westerns, the streets are full of mud and the people are covered with it.
I lived out west for nearly 20 years. Trust me: It's dry. The Great Plains were once known as "The Great American Desert" for a reason. If you want a lawn, you have to water daily. If you want a garden, you have to water twice a day. If you want mud, you're out of luck for about 345 days out of the year.
But apparently, at some point, somebody pointed out to Hollywood that people didn't bathe very often in the olden days and so they decided the way to be authentic was to slather everyone with mud. And, boy, has it become holy writ.
It's not the most annoying thing that came out of Hollywood's brush with history. Someone also pointed out that candles aren't klieg lights, so that every western and every swashbuckler for the last 20 years has looked like it was filmed in the bottom of a coal mine.
I wrote a column about this, which I can't find now, back when "Braveheart" won the Oscar for Best Picture, beating out "Babe."
In the column, I pointed out that Mel Gibson had this ridiculously tangled, teased-out hair despite being clean shaven, and had black stuff smeared all over his face, with the result that he looked like a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader who'd been given an exploding cigar.
By contrast, the pig was clean and pink throughout.
Which, I insisted then and insist today, is why "Braveheart" won the Oscar. They should never have washed the pig.
A couple of weeks ago, "Ivanhoe" was on TV, the 1952 version with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders and a wealth of recognizable faces, recognizable in part because they were good character actors who got a lot of work and in part because the sets were properly lit and the actors were not all smeared with mud.
Is it "authentic"?
I'm sure a historian could go through and point out all sorts of gaffes and anachronisms and thank god they don't all speak a mix of Middle English and Norman French. So, no, it's not.
But it certainly lives up to the romance it is supposed to be, with chivalry and all that good Chretien de Troyes sort of stuff. And, after all, the romances themselves were never authentic: Arthur lived before knighthood, and before armor. He'd have fought from a chariot and carried a woven reed shield, and I haven't seen the filmmaker yet who wants to be that authentic.
However, as the NYTimes review noted at the time, "Ivanhoe" is reasonably true to Sir Walter Scott's novel, and it gives George Sanders a chance to play one of the most nuanced villains in cinema, Sir Brian De Bois-Guilbert, who falls in love with Rebecca of York, a woman he cannot love, not because she is a commoner but because she is a Jew. The fact that she has an equally unattainable love for Ivanhoe fuels his hatred and he is, at the last, put into the impossible position of attempting to uphold his sacred oath of chivalric honor without losing his immortal soul.
Compared with the sneering, cardboard, all-but-mustache-twirling, psychopathic one-dimensional villains of modern movies — including "Braveheart" — Sanders is far more authentic, and the film is, thus, more authentic for it.
Despite the fact that everyone is clean and well-lighted.
The movie is available on-line from YouTube for $1.99, and Dave Kellett is currently having a sale of his wonderful cartoon collections for more than $1.99 but quite a bit less than you would usually pay.
His coming attraction is at the top of the page, here is Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe's:
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