If only as a change from Dickens, I thought I'd mark Edith Wharton's 150th birthday this week by watching the movie version of The House of Mirth ... but found that I couldn't bear watching Gillian Anderson as one of my favourite tragic literary heroines, Lily Bart. I turned it off in disgust.
So instead I've been watching wonderful Bette Davis as The Old Maid in the 1939 movie version of one of Wharton's Old New York stories, which I've never read.
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You are wicked, Charlotte. You are wicked.
No, I'm not wicked. I never could have done what you've done to me. You made me an old maid ...
Completely over the top and irresistible and all the more enjoyable for knowing that, in real life, Bette Davis and her co-star Miriam Hopkins really had their claws in each other.
6 comments:
It's a great movie, I hadn't realised that it was based on an Edith Wharton novel. I must re watch! Jude x
I'd never seen it before. Jude. Only came across it through the Wharton connection this week. Thoroughly enjoyed it last night with the last bag of chocolate snowballs left over from Christmas!
I've never seen The Old Maid but it sounds like just the sort of movie you can't beat on a rainy weekend afternoon. I must admit that I did have a chuckle at the name, Clem Spender, though.
Glad you're back with us, Darlene!
Do you just not like Gillian Andersen or just here in that role. She was great as Lady Dedlock.
It was just in that role, Lizzie. She was great in Bleak House and as Miss Havisham ... I've just seen her Miss Havisham wedding gowns (three of them, in varying stages of decay) at the Museum of London.
Maybe I should have another go at House of Mirth ... I gave up on it quite quickly as it didn't measure up to the book.
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