Meg Ryan | First Impressions

Went to the BFI to see RICH AND FAMOUS, on 35mm, in a print that seemed untouched but for time: not a scratch but all slightly turned to red. I saw it when it came out and it spoke to me. I showed it to students ten years later and they thought it the worst film of all time. Pauline Kael famously wrote, ‘it isn’t camp exactly, it’s more like a homosexual fantasy’ and was attacked for outing George Cukor, then over 80. This would be his last film. The film outs itself really. It IS a homosexual fantasy. Every shot of Matt Lattanzi and Hart Bochner tell you so; not to speak of the ending, where the two old friends sit by the fire, drinking champagne, content with each other and with their friendship having superseded love affairs and family; evoking a whole gay structure of feeling of its particular time. When one posits this next to the beginning, with the opening line, ‘Merry, what are you doing in the closet’? Well…. But to Dave and I it was also super camp and we screeched – as quietly as we could – at every line. Candice Bergen is very good and very funny. This, after her comic turn in STARTING OVER (Alan J. Pakula, 1989)is really what made possible her subsequent career in comedy. There are some shots in the film where her beauty is startling. Jaqueline Bisset produced. A remake of Old Acquaintance (|Vincent Sherman, 1943) with Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins where Bette famously says, as only she could, ‘There are times in a woman’s life where the only thing that will help is a glass of champagne’. The film is better than legend has it, more interesting than I remembered, and if not quite good was certainly hugely enjoyable. Meg Ryan appears in an early role as Bergen’s daughter; and there are many famous people as background extras in the party scenes (Christopher Isherwood, Gavin Lambert, Ray Bradbury, etc.)

José Arroyo

One a great masterpiece of cinema, the other a cultural icon of its day, we compare and contrast Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner with Nora Ephron’s technologically updated remake, You’ve Got Mail. We discuss how each film treats its conceit of two people who dislike each other unwittingly falling in love over anonymous correspondence, the former film’s couple hating each other less vitriolically, the latter giving us more insight into the details of their messages; the latter making their story the entire focus, the former handling it as the main part of a range of stories that take place amongst its characters.

We consider whether James Stewart’s Alfred and Tom Hanks’s Joe are nice people, and what the films’ endings have to say about them and the women they fall for. José focuses on the films’ approach to class and power, praising The Shop Around the Corner‘s portrayal of working people and decrying You’ve Got Mail for barely even seeming to notice its uncritical acceptance of corporate power. And we consider more besides, including how Lubitsch’s camera makes a static setting evocative and expressive, that Godfather bit, and the similarities and differences in Hanks and Stewart’s often-compared personas.