Long live editors!

While Tom is away, I rent a lot of films on DVD. Yesterday I saw for the first time the 'director's cut' of one of my all-time favourites, Cinema Paradiso, and I was horribly shocked.

What???!?! During his return visit to Giancaldo, Salvatore not only finds that Elena is married to that really stupid kid from his class at school, but meets her again because he notices her daughter and follows her home. Then he has a steamy encounter with Elena in the car. And she won't go back to Rome with him, and the whole way they'd parted was a huge mistake though partly Alfredo's fault, because he'd decided that Salvatore had to become a great film director and if he and Elena stayed together, he wouldn't make any films. And her note to him is still pinned to the cinema wall with the invoices, although the cinema has only been shut for 6 years before the pending demolition, but they must nevertheless have last seen each other in the 1950s and the present day is 1980-something......I'm upset - by the implausibility, trivialisation, confusion and more. Whoever told the director that the film would be much stronger without this really, seriously, knew what he/she was doing.

Bravo for editors.

The Morricone score is still wonderful.

Anyone else cry over old movies?

I disgraced myself yesterday by dissolving into FLOODS at my oldest friend's dad's birthday party. The evening included (convoluted explanation omitted) a viewing of an astonishing film from the 1940s entitled HUMORESQUE, starring Joan Crawford and John Garfield, with Oscar Levant as light relief/fantastic pianist. John Garfield plays a gifted young violinist from a disadvantaged background in New York. Joan Crawford is an older(ish), wealthy, married, society party-giver who helps his career and falls for him in the process. He falls for her too. She drinks too much, is deeply insecure and a little short-sighted (in many ways). He plays music, music and more music - played on the soundtrack by Isaac Stern. Music arranged and conducted by Franz Waxman, including his wild version of the Liebestod from Tristan for violin, piano and orchestra - to which Joan Crawford ultimately goes to pieces and drowns herself. The screenplay is multilayered, insightful, accurate and original and turns out to be by Clifford Odets. I was a snuffling wreck at the end.

Sample line: "A French philosopher once wrote down 300 ways of committing suicide. He left one out: fall in love with an Artist..."