A belated Happy New Year to everyone visiting this blog, and thanks very much for all your support. I intend to update more this year, hopefully at least once a week, so watch this space! This will mean keeping my postings shorter, as I have been promising for ages… though I may relapse into long-windedness when I write about one of my favourite actors or directors. Anyway, up to now I haven’t written about any new releases on this blog, as I’m concentrating on films from the past, but in the last week I’ve seen two acclaimed new films which are about classic movie-making, The Artist and My Week with Marilyn, so I thought it would make a change to write something about each of them.
I liked both, especially The Artist, which feels almost like a film made for me personally – though I know many others feel this too. For one thing, it is a loving homage to films made between 1929 and 1932, a period covering the death of silent films and the birth of pre-Code talkies, which I have been discovering over the last couple of years. (The hero, played by Jean Dujardin, looks uncannily like John Barrymore, one of my favourite actors, in some of his swashbuckling roles, especially when he turns his head and is glimpsed in profile.) For another, the plot is yet another version of A Star Is Born, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the past year watching and writing about various versions of this endlessly reworked story.