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In 1955 the New Statesman published an article by the pundit Malcolm Muggeridge with a headline that would become a cliché of British political commentary. Republished in May 2012 for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, ‘The Royal Soap Opera’ compared newspaper coverage of Princess Margaret’s romance with Royal Air Force Group Captain Peter Townsend to that bestowed on Rita
documentary Romance and the Royals . ‘The Windsors’, however, offered telling insights into the royal family, particularly the Queen, including her thorny relationship with her daughter-in-law Diana, Prince William’s mother, in whose memory a concert had been held earlier in the year to mark the tenth anniversary of her death, and thereby into the politics of succession, royal marriages and births
Seattle was a huge box-office hit, grossing $228m in worldwide theatrical receipts alone, and proving extremely successful as a video and soundtrack album. On its release, many of the reviewers noted Sleepless in Seattle ’s emphasis on ‘retro-romance’, seeing it as a nostalgic revisiting of the classical Hollywood romantic comedy. 33 The trajectory of the film works gradually
is easy to perceive the appeal of royal movies – costumes, carriages and national celebration vie with martial display, violence and, as we shall see, romance. And, not incidentally, the prominence of Britain’s queens, from the Celtic Boudicaa (played by Alex Kingston in 2003) to Elizabeth II (played by Helen Mirren in 2006), offers plentiful leading roles to women as representatives of an institution deemed to have become
would build up her navy, he is drawn into her passion. Yet as he brings into play the issue of romance, assuring her that he envies the man who will be her admiral, the tone of the scene changes, and we realise that her political ambition is shown to be in conflict with her romantic desire. The passion she has for her (future) empire transforms into a jealousy that she must contain as Seymour leaves her side to embrace his
the present Queen Elizabeth. These films are much more focused on the private sphere: romance, family and the life of the royal household. The public sphere of politics and events outside the royal household tends to function as a backdrop, only intruding on the drama in so far as it is the consequence of what happens in the private sphere. Films and monarchs that fall into this category, again ordered
submarine and the might of Nazi sea power. In 1958 he directed an adaptation of Richard Mason’s romantic wartime novel The Wind Cannot Read , with Dirk Bogarde as a naive British officer who falls in love with a young Japanese interpreter with terminal brain disease. 8 The doomed romance is enacted in a threatening and exotic (and confusing) Raj setting. It has one extraordinary sequence, usually cut for transmission on British
Bernhardt’s acting. (Jay Leyda and Andre Bazin are also critical of her theatricality.) My point is that ‘filmed theatre’ has long been used as a term of critique in film studies. 9 See, for example, Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town , p. 316. See also Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Romancing the Queen’, in The
, the usual process of fiction-to-film adaptation is reversed: Forman’s historical novel, The Pony Express: A Romance , derived from his research for the film, was published after the movie’s premiere. 14 Demonstrating the studio’s disavowal of any economic imperative behind the prestige frontier feature, this text helped reinforce Paramount’s promotional claims that their films offered patrons a
Here we might think also of the father in Family Viewing , methodically revising the family romance by overdubbing home videos of his first marriage and son’s childhood with pornographic footage which he and his partner are coached through by a phone sex worker. Despite these characters’ attempts to transform and exoticise themselves, their alienation from such idealised identities remains