Marion,

I loved the movie, but was always thinking about how modern the story was: the Irish vs English seemed a lot like Serb vs Croat.

Robert

ps: the other movie in the past 12 months that I liked was "Walk The Line" (but is the Dylan that Johnny Cash sang poetry? that's another topic!)

About Terence Rattigan's "The Browning Version" (which I think is the great teacher-play of all time), the first movie version starred Michael Redgrave, and later it was made for TV starring John Gielgud in one of his best performances. Of course the real poet in the play is Aeschylus; the "Browning version" is of "Agamemnon."

And speaking of T.S. Eliot, why hasn't a movie been
made of "Cats" - or have I missed it?

Gail, there's a video of "Cats" that was shown on the Vegas PBS station a few years ago. "Murder In The Cathedral" was made into a film in 1952 (if you have seen the Eliot episode of <u>Voices & Visions</u>, they showed a couple of scenes from it, lasting about a minute or two). There is a web site, www.imdb.com , that lists it with some data, like: date, Director (Hoellering), writing (TSE & Hoellering), the cast (John Groser as Becket, etc including TSE as 4th tempter and Leo McKern [who died a few years ago, and was famous as <u>Rumpole of the Bailey</u>; he also was a monk in <u>Ladyhawk</u>, one of the No. 2's in <u>The Prisoner</u>, and Herod the Great in <u>The Nativity</u>] as 3rd knight), and a runtime of 140 mins. I've always wanted a copy of the film version of <u>Murder In The Cathedral</u> (either tape or disk), but it has never been available.

It had a book from it with pictures, the screenplay (it was slightly different the play, adding a Henry II character), and a preface written by Eliot.


THE FILM OF MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
by TS Eliot and George Hoellering (Faber & Faber, 1952)


"....The... most obvious difference [between stage & film]... was that the cinema... is much more realistic than the stage. ...In watching a stage performance, the member of the audience is in direct contact with the actor, is always conscious that he is looking at a stage and listening to an actor play a part. In looking at a film, we are much more passive; as audience, we contribute less. We are seized with the illusion that we are observing the actual event, or at least a series of photographs of the actual event; and nothing must be allowed to break this illusion. ...


"....The speeches of the Four Knights [in "Murder in the Cathedral"], which in the play are addressed directly to the audience, had to be completely revised. ...This also is a consequence of the realism of film: the Stilbruch -as such an abrupt change is aptly called in German- would be intolerable. ...For one thing, the camera must never stand still. An audience can give their attention to four men actually speaking to them; but to look at the picture of the same four men for that length of time would be an intolerable strain. ...


"In looking at a film we are always under the direction of the eye. It is part of the problem of the producer, to decide to what point on the screen, at every moment, the eyes of the audience are to be directed. You are, in fact, looking at the picture, though you do not realise it, through the eyes of the producer. What you see is what he makes the camera see. The fact that the audience's vision is directed by the producer of the film has special consequences for a verse play. It is important, first, that what you see should never distract your attention from what you hear. ...Several visual effects, magnificent in themselves, were sacrificed because ...the audience in watching them would cease to attend to the words. Second, the fact that the illustration of the words by the scene is, so much more positively than on the stage, an interpretation of the meaning of the words, points to the conclusion that only a producer who understands poetry, and has taken a good deal of trouble to grasp the value of every line, is competent to deal with such a play at all. ..."


TS Eliot, 1952


[This message has been edited by Robert Meyer (edited April 10, 2006).]

" Chris and Robert -

The primary literary antecedent for Apocalypse Now was not a poem, but a poetic novel - Conrad's Heart of Darkness - with the Marlon Brando character a stand-in for Kurtz."

I know this. My point was that the poem read by Brando has its epigraph taken from the novel on which the movie is based. So Brando's Kurtz -- he was named Kurtz, wasn't he? -- was reading from a poem in which he was named in the epigraph.

Clay, A.I., yes, thank you.

To justify my making this post, I will now type out a poem about movies.

The Invisible Man

We are kids with orange Jujubes stuck to our chins
and licorice sticks snaking out of our jeans pockets,
and we see him, or rather don't see him, when the bandages
uncoil from his face and lo, there's nothing between
the hat and suit. It is wonderful, this pure nothing,
but we begin to be troubled by the paradoxes of non-existence
(Can he pee? If he itches, can he scratch? If he eats
Milk Duds, do they disappear?). Sure, standing around
in the girls' lockerroom unobserved or floating erasers
in math class, who could resist, but the enigma
of sheer absence, the loss of the body, of who we are,
continues to grind against us even into the Roy Rogers
western that follows. The pungent Vista Vision embodiments
of good and evil--this clear-eyed young man with watermelon
voice and high principles, the fat, unshaven dipshits
with no respect for old ladies or hard-working Baptist
farmers--none of this feels quite solid anymore. Granted,
it's the world as the world appears, but provisional somehow,
a shadow, a ghost, dragging behind every rustled cow
or runaway stagecoach, and though afterwards the cloud
of insubstantiality lifts and fades as we stroll out
grimacing into the hard sunlight, there is that
slight tremble of deja-vu years later in Philosophy 412
as Professor Caws mumbles on about essence and existence,
being and nothingness, and Happy Trails to You echoes
from the far end of the hall.
...........................................In The Invisible Man
sometimes we could see the thread or thin wire that lifted
the gun from the thief's hand, and at the Hearst mansion
only days ago a sign explained that the orchestra
of Leonard Slye entertained the zillionaire and his Hollywood
friends on spring evenings caressed by ocean breezes
and the scent of gardenias. you can almost see them swaying
to Mood Indigo or Cherokee, champagne glasses in hand:
Chaplin, Gable, Marion Davies, Herman Mankiewicz,
and cruising large as the Titanic, William Randolph Hearst,
Citizen Kane himself. Leonard Slye sees this, too, along with
the Roman statuary and rare medieval tapestries, and thinks
someday, someday, and becomes invisible so that he
can appear later as Roy Rogers and make movies in
Victorville, California, where Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
will write the story of an enormous man who misplaced
his childhood and tried to call it back on his death-bed.
O Leonard Slye, lifting Roy's six-gun from its holster,
O Hearst, dreaming of Rosebud and raping the castles of Europe,
O America, with your dreams of money and power,
small boys sit before your movie screens invisible
to themselves, waiting for the next episode, in which they
stumble blind into daylight and the body of the world.

B.H. Fairchild

I'm such a lightweight. Seeing Rodney Dangerfield recite Do Not Go Gentle would probably disturb my sleep for a very long time. You're a brave man, Chris.

Blake's tyger weaves very nicely throughout a meaty little film called "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys". Good one to see, with Jodie Foster as pretty frightening peg-legged nun.

So there are poems on movies, movies on poems, and then there are poems that are cinematic, and cinema that's poetic. Speaking of the latter, some months ago saw a marvelous little film called "you me and everyone we know"
and was so taken by some of the music I made myself sit through all the closing credits. Discovered some of the lyrics had come from a Richard Wilbur poem/hymn. And how cool is that...

In "Must Love Dogs" the character played by Christopher Plummer recites "Brown Penny" by W.B. Yeats.