Author Topic: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)  (Read 31144 times)

Offline southendmd

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #10 on: July 22, 2008, 04:22:39 pm »
I'd love one! And now, thanks to aphasia, I stutter like Anthony Blanche, I should learn how to be wicked and depraved like Anthony!  ::)


I expanded my vocabulary by listening to Anthony Blanche utter such words as "macabre" and "lugubrious".  "She's a bloodsucker, I tell you, a bloodsucker."

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #11 on: July 22, 2008, 06:06:27 pm »
     I  knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable
for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by
reason of his beauty, which was arresting,  and his eccentricities of
behaviour which seemed to know no bounds. My first sight of him was as we
passed in the door of Germer's, and, on that occasion, I was struck less by
his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large Teddy-bear.

     "That," said the barber, as I took his chair, "was Lord Sebastian
Flyte. A most amusing young gentleman."

     "Apparently," I said coldly.

     "The Marquis of Marchmain's second boy. His brother, the Earl  of
Brideshead, went down last term. Now he was very different, a very quiet
gentleman, quite like an old man. What do you suppose Lord Sebastian wanted?
A hair brush for his Teddy-bear; it had to have very stiff bristles,  not,
Lord Sebastian said, to brush him with, but to threaten him  with a spanking
when  he was sulky.  He bought a  very nice one with an ivory back and he's
having 'Aloysius' engraved on it -- that's  the bear's  name." The man, who,
in  his time,  had had  ample chance to tire  of undergraduate fantasy, was
plainly captivated by him.  I, however, remained censorious and subsequent
glimpses  of Sebastian, driving in a hansom cab and dining at the George  in
false whiskers, did not soften me, although Collins, who was reading Freud,
had a number of technical terms to cover everything.

     Nor, when at  last we met, were the circumstances propitious. It  was
shortly before midnight in early March; I had been entertaining  the college
intellectuals to mulled claret;  the fire was roaring, the air of my room
heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics. I threw open
my  windows  and  from the  quad outside came the not  uncommon sounds of
bibulous laughter and unsteady  steps.  A voice  said: "Hold up"; another,
"Come on"; another, "Plenty  of time  . .  .  House .  . .  till Tom  stops
ringing";  and  another, clearer than the rest, "D'you  know I feel most
unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute,"  and there appeared at my
window the face I knew to be Sebastian's -- but not as I had formerly seen
it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing
eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick.

     It was  not unusual for dinner parties to end in that way; there was in
fact a recognized tariff on such occasions for the comfort of the scout; we
were all learning, by  trial and error, to carry our wine. There was also a
kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian's choice, in his
extremity, of an open window.  But, when all  is  said, it remained an
unpropitious meeting.

     His friends bore him to the gate and, in a few minutes, his host,  an
amiable Etonian of my year, returned to apologize. He, too, was  tipsy and
his explanations were repetitive and, towards the  end, tearful. "The wines
were too various," he said; "it was  neither  the quality  nor the quantity
that  was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of
the matter. To understand all is to forgive all."

     "Yes," I said, but it was with a sense of grievance that I faced Lunt's
reproaches next morning.

     "A couple of jugs of mulled claret between the five of you," Lunt said,
"and  this had to happen. Couldn't even get to the window.  Those that can't
keep it down are better without it."

     "It wasn't one of my party. It was someone from out of college."

     "Well, it's just as nasty clearing it up, whoever it was."

     "There's five shillings on the sideboard."

     "So I saw and thank you, but I'd rather not have the money and not have
the mess, any morning."

     I took my gown and left him to his task. I still frequented the lecture
room in those days, and  it was after eleven when I returned  to college. I
found my room full of  flowers; what  looked  like, and, in fact, was,  the
entire day's  stock of a market-stall stood in every conceivable vessel in
every part of the  room. Lunt was secreting the last of them in brown paper
preparatory to taking them home.

     "Lunt, what is all this?"

     "The gentleman from last night, sir, he left a note for you."

     The note was written in conte crayon on a whole sheet of my choice
Whatman H.P.  drawing paper: I am very contrite. Aloysius won't speak to me
until he  sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon to-day.  Sebastian
Flyte.
It was typical of him, I  reflected, to assume I knew where he lived;
but then, I did know. '

     "A most amusing gentleman, I'm sure it's quite a pleasure to clean  up
after him. I take it you're  lunching out, sir.  I told Mr. Collins and Mr.
Partridge so--they wanted to have their commons in here with you."

     "Yes, Lunt, lunching out."

     That luncheon party --  for party it proved to be -- was the beginning
of a new epoch in my life, but its details are dimmed for me and confused by
so many others,  almost identical with it, that succeeded one another that
term and the next, like romping cupids in a Renaissance frieze.

     I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a
tiny, priggish, warning voice  in my ear which in the tones of Collins told
me it was seemly to hold  back.  But I was in search of love in those days,
and  I went full  of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that
here, at  last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I
knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden,
which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey
city.

     Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was
alone when I came, peeling a plover's egg taken from the large nest of moss
in the centre of the table.

     "I've just counted them," he said.  "There were five each and two over,
so I'm having the two.  I'm unaccountably  hungry to-day.  I  put myself
unreservedly  in the hands of Dolbear and Goodall,  and feel so drugged that
I've begun to believe that the whole of yesterday evening was a  dream.
Please don't wake me up."

     He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme
youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

     His room was filled with a strange jumble of objects -- a harmonium in
a gothic case, an elephant's-foot waste-paper basket, a  dome of wax fruit,
two disproportionately large Sevres vases,  framed drawings  by Daumier --
made all the more incongruous by the austere college furniture and the large
luncheon table. His chimney-piece was  covered with cards of invitation from
London hostesses.

     "That beast Hobson has put Aloysius in the bedder," he said. "Perhaps
it's as well as there wouldn't have been any plovers' eggs for him.  D'you
know, Hobson hates Aloysius? I wish I had a scout like yours. He was sweet
to me this morning where some people might have been quite strict."

     The party assembled. There were three Etonian freshmen, mild, elegant,
detached young men who had all been to a dance in London the night before,
and spoke of it  as  though it had been the funeral of a near but unloved
kinsman. Each as he came into the room made  first for the plovers' eggs,
then noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which
seemed to say: "We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that
you never met us before."

     "The first this year," they said. "Where do you get them?"

     "Mummy sends them from Brideshead. They always lay early for her."

     When the eggs were gone and we were eating the lobster Newburg,  the
last guest arrived.

     "My dear," he said, "I couldn't get away before. I was lunching with my
p-p-preposterous tutor. He thought it very odd my leaving when I did. I told
him I had to change for F-f-footer."

     From the moment he arrived the newcomer took charge, talking in a
luxurious, self-taught stammer;  teasing; caricaturing the guests at his
previous luncheon; telling lubricious anecdotes of Paris and Berlin; and
doing more  than entertain -- transfiguring  the party, shedding a vivid,
false light of eccentricity upon everyone so that the three prosaic Etonians
seemed suddenly to become creatures of his fantasy.

     This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par
excellence,
a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville, a young
man who seemed to me, then, fresh from the sombre company of  the College
Essay Society, ageless as a lizard,  as foreign as a Martian. He had been
pointed out to me often in the streets, as he moved with his own peculiar
stateliness,  as  though he had not fully  accustomed himself to coat and
trousers and was more at his ease  in heavy, embroidered robes; I had heard
his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him,
under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like
the fine piece of cookery he was.

     After luncheon he stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had
appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian's room, and in
languishing, sobbing tones recited passages from  The  Waste  Land to the
sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.

     " 'I, Tiresias,  have foresuffered all,'"  he  sobbed to them from  the
Venetian arches --

     "Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
     I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
     And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead. . . ."

     And then, stepping lightly into the room,  "How I have surprised  them!
All boatmen are Grace Darlings to me."

     We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the
Etonians sang "Home they brought Her warrior dead" to his own accompaniment
on the harmonium.

     It was four o'clock before we broke up.

     Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary
leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: "My dear, I should like
to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion," and to me: "I
think it's perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do
you lurk?  I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivy you out like an old
st-t-toat."

     The others left  soon after him. I  rose to go with them, but Sebastian
said: "Have some more Cointreau," so I stayed and later he said, "I  must go
to the Botanical Gardens."

     "Why?"
     
     "To see the ivy."

     It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as
we walked under the walls of Merton.

     "I've never been to the Botanical Gardens," I said.

     "Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a  beautiful arch
there and more different kinds  of ivy than I knew existed. I don't  know
where I should be without the Botanical Gardens."

     When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had
left  them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me
before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be
real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.

     It was the end of the screen. Lunt never liked it, and after a few days
he took it away, to an obscure refuge he had under the stairs, full of mops
and buckets.

     That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it
came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade
of the high elms, watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the
branches.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline southendmd

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #12 on: July 22, 2008, 06:46:20 pm »
"But I was in search of love in those days,
and  I went full  of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that
here, at  last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I
knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden,
which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey
city."



**sigh**

Offline louisev

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #13 on: July 22, 2008, 08:52:50 pm »
I guess I was too young then.  I found the book tedious and the series even moreso.  I think the reason I did was because it seemed that Waugh was spending way too much time avoiding coming out and telling the reader that Sebastian was GAY GAY GAY, and I lost patience with it.  And the series was just as coy as the book in doing the same thing.

I had the same problem with 'A Separate Peace.'

So I don't think i'll be going to the movies for this one!!
“Mr. Coyote always gets me good, boy,”  Ellery said, winking.  “Almost forgot what life was like before I got me my own personal coyote.”


Offline southendmd

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #14 on: July 22, 2008, 09:11:50 pm »
OT, but here's Parker Stevenson with John Heyl in A Separate Peace (1972):


Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #15 on: July 22, 2008, 11:19:48 pm »
--I found the book tedious and the series even moreso.  I think the reason I did was because it seemed that Waugh was spending way too much time avoiding coming out and telling the reader that Sebastian was GAY GAY GAY, and I lost patience with it.  And the series was just as coy as the book in doing the same thing--So I don't think i'll be going to the movies for this one!!

I will say on Evelyn Waugh's behalf (not that he needs it), that Waugh, ultra-conservative reactionary, snob, something of a monster, was never coy. In the upperclass hothouse of Oxford, Homosexuality with a capital 'H' was, shall we say, assumed.

Sebastian (Waugh's creation) is obviously gay. He is a seriously determined alcoholic. But he is also, literally, a living saint. And Waugh, scathingly, mordantly funny about everything else, is serious about God, religion, and the reality of living saints.

Brideshead may not be your cup of tea, which is valid. In any case, definitely do not see the new film as it is clearly bad. But the book is not tedious--it is not very long, and it is often quite slyly funny. The Granada series is long (it needs it be), but it is not tedious either--it is slow and sumptuous and elegaic. A jewel, in fact. A piece of art.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #16 on: July 23, 2008, 11:21:15 am »
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meadow_Building

The Meadow Buildings



From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Meadow Building (known as "Meadows" to undergraduates) is part of Christ Church, Oxford, England, looking out onto Christ Church Meadow. It was built in 1863 to the designs of Sir Thomas Deane in the Venetian style (favoured by the famous Christ Church art historian John Ruskin). Single rooms in the Meadow Building look out over either the college or the Christ Church Meadow, although originally, college undergraduates would be given a suite of rooms with views overlooking both sides. Recent building work has converted most of these rooms to ensuite while leaving one staircase, which is primarily non-residential, as was.

When it was first built, the relative distance of the Meadow Building from the more fashionable Peckwater and Canterbury Quads meant that it was considered the least desirable accommodation in college.


Literary references

"So I found myself installed in delightfully spacious rooms within the Victorian wing of an elegant Tudor college, with the beauty of the Christ Church Meadow spread panoramically on the other side of my window panes. The Meadows block was more tranquil in spirit than the rowdier atmosphere of Peckwater." The Marquess of Bath refers to the college in 1953, Strictly Private (2001)

"I discovered the huge and ungainly pile of Ruskinian Gothic known as Meadow Building, where I would be spending the next two years. […] Blissfully ignorant of the social geography of the House, I did not realize that I had been relegated to the furthest outpost of the college demesne. From the lofty vantage point of the Old Etonians and Old Harrovians who lived in Peckwater and Canterbury I might just as well have been relegated to Siberia. My sitting room lay on the top floor of the last entry in Meadow Building." L Perry Curtis refers to the college in 1955, Christ Church Matters (2005)

"Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was alone when I came, peeling a plover's egg taken from the large nest of moss in the centre of the table." Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline southendmd

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #17 on: July 23, 2008, 12:53:40 pm »
Some IMDb trivia regarding the original TV series:

Originally, producer Derek Granger asked Anthony Andrews to play the role of Charles Ryder. Andrews, however, felt he was better suited for the part of Sebastian Flyte. Jeremy Irons, Granger's first choice for Sebastian, preferred to play Ryder, so the two actors swapped roles.

The ship in the storm scenes is actually unused footage from The Poseidon Adventure (1972).  [edit:  this seems like a joke.]

Laurence Olivier was offered his choice of roles in either Lord Marchmain or Edward Ryder (which ultimately went to John Gielgud). Olivier picked Lord Marchmain, but later regretted the choice as he realized that Edward Ryder was actually a much stronger role.

Sebastian's teddy bear, Aloysius, was based on a real one called Archie which belonged to John Betjeman, one of Evelyn Waugh's friends from his days at Oxford university.

***

Also, I remember hearing, perhaps on the DVD extras, that because of a lengthy tech strike, filming was considerably delayed.  It was during that time that Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom became available.  Also, the script was re-thought:  rather than the original 6-hour length, it was decided to essentially film the whole story, all 13 hours.  I believe this was when they included Charles's voice-over, essentially verbatim from the novel. 

Offline southendmd

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #18 on: July 23, 2008, 01:10:05 pm »
Just like Charles, I find myself recalling my very first viewing of "Brideshead Revisited".

Just having come out, and fallen in love, winter 1982, I was home from college for the weekend, freshman year.  Generally bored, I turned on the TV, a little black-and-white set in the kitchen, and was dumbstruck. 

There, I saw two very handsome young men walking in a garden, arm in arm.  I was hooked, not even knowing what it was.  Consulting the TV guide, I saw that it was being repeated later that evening, so I watched it from the start.  The language, the visuals, the performances.  Ahh.

As I didn't own a TV in college, I had to scramble every Monday night to borrow one.  To my surprise, my straight roommate even got caught up and wanted to watch it with me.  "Is your show on tonight?" he'd say.

My bf even got a teddy bear he called "Ignatius".  LOL.

In those days, I had hoped for a happy ending for Charles and Sebastian. :(

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)
« Reply #19 on: July 23, 2008, 01:45:14 pm »
Brideshead may not be your cup of tea, which is valid. In any case, definitely do not see the new film as it is clearly bad. But the book is not tedious--it is not very long, and it is often quite slyly funny. The Granada series is long (it needs it be), but it is not tedious either--it is slow and sumptuous and elegaic. A jewel, in fact. A piece of art.

I'm afraid it's not my cup of Earl Grey either, none of it. While I can appreciate, intellectually and in the abstract, what a work of art the old series is, and despite being the Anglophile that I am, I find that whole British-aristocracy-between-the-wars scene crashingly boring. And characters with names like Flyte and Marchmain make me want to leave the room.

However, thanks to Paul's post referencing A Separate Peace, I got to wondering, Who is John Heyl? I'd never heard of him, but just look at him in that photo with Parker Stevenson! Unfortunately, all ImDB has on him is the one reference to A Separate Peace. No biographical information, nothing. I shall have to do a Google search, I guess.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.