Today, in our final segment on this topic, we soldier on with notations about the movies on British Film Institute’s list of 50 films recommended to see before turning the age of 14.
Pictures from the 1940s include It’s a Wonderful Life, Britain’s Oliver Twist, Italy’s The Bicycle Thief, and France’s Beauty and the Beast.
We covered The Bicycle Thief earlier in the week. Who can escape the Frank Capra classic (and who would want to)? Oliver Twist is reasonably familiar but the final designation, Beauty and the Beast, may not be.
Frankly, the 1946 movie poses tough sledding for today’s under-14, digital device set. It’s considered a French classic from that supremely protean cultural figure of the time, Jean Cocteau (poet, filmmaker, visual artisan, essayist, gay man-about-town and suspected German collaborator during World War II; he died in 1963 at the age of 74).
As British critic David Thomson writes: Cocteau is a vital link between the avant garde and the underground….His overwrought cult of the self, as well as the homosecxual cluster that attended him, served to cut him off from real human material.
In comparing Cocteau to Orson Wells, Thomson adds, Welles was a man of the theater, Cocteau of theatricality.
Be that as it may, Cocteau was at home telling visual fairy tales as he did with Beauty and the Beast, based on a 1757 romantic fantasy about a self-sacrificing daughter devoted to her father, who (the father) enrages the Beast by picking a rose from the Beast’s garden (don’t ask). Of course, a liaison between the Beauty and the Beast ensues (the film’s French title is La Belle et La Bete). Josette Day portrays the former, Jean Marais the latter.
How this all will play at home before an antsy pre-adolescent, immersed in several electronic devices, is anyone’s guess. Give it a try. (No guarantees from the British Film Institute, however.)
Joe & Frank well understand that getting the attention of the vast majority of young people today or even their parents… Well, let’s be kind and just say it’s the ultimate in generation gaps and an almost impossible task!
As for DAVID THOMSON – called “without doubt, the greatest living film historian” by the LA Times, which he may well be that today…
But back in the day, way before the IMDB, before film criticism went totally anal and meaningless as far as the general movie going public were concerned…
There was LESLIE HALLIWELL, a British film critic, encyclopaedist and television impresario who in 1965 compiled The Filmgoer’s Companion, the first one-volume encyclopaedia devoted to all aspects of the cinema. He followed it a dozen years later with Halliwell’s Film Guide, another monumental work of effort and devotion. In the era before the internet, Halliwell’s books were regarded as the number one source for movie information, and his name became synonymous with film knowledge and research.
For me, and many others Halliwell was the father of film criticism, debate and “must see” lists. And today, thirty years after his death at age 59, he is still for me at least, the definitive source.
Halliwell didn’t just talk about movies and write books about them, he actually worked in the British film industry and went on to become the chief buyer of films and TV shows for the BBC’s only rival ITV.
Leslie Halliwell was in the proverbial right place at the right time…
The British people always appreciated American movies and TV shows more than Americans themselves. They were always more loyal to the movies and the stars, and always more awed and interested by the whole filmmaking process… And the British Film Institute, the BFI was the first, and went on to become the holy shrine of film appreciation, education and discussion.
Halliwell worked briefly for Picturegoer magazine in London before returning to Cambridge to manage the Rex Cinema from 1952 to 1956. Under his management it became extremely popular with the Cambridge undergraduate community, showing classic and vintage films such as THE BLUE ANGEL, CITIZEN KANE and DESTRY RIDES AGAIN. The Cambridge Evening News reported, ‘students felt their periods at Cambridge were incomplete without the weekly visit to the Rex.’
In 1955, after the British Censor had banned the Marlon Brando film THE WILD ONE, Halliwell arranged for Cambridge magistrates to assess the picture. They subsequently granted him a special licence and the Rex became the only cinema in Britain to show the film.
In 2011, author Michael Binder wrote a definitive biography called Halliwell’s Horizon: Leslie Halliwell and his Film Guides, and it really does justice to the man and what he accomplished. Since Halliwell’s death, fellow film critic John Walker has taken on the task of updating and revising the Halliwell guides.
I wonder what Leslie Halliwell would think of today’s film,TV show and celebrity worshipping… Somehow, I feel it would not be his cup of tea at all!