Waiting on Wednesday (40)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. So here's a thing I'm gleefully looking forward to: William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back, by Ian Doescher (Quirk Books, 18 March 2014).

 Return to the star-crossed galaxy far, far away as the brooding young hero, a power-mad emperor, and their jesting droids match wits, struggle for power, and soliloquize in elegant and impeccable iambic pentameter. Illustrated with beautiful black-and-white Elizabethan-style artwork, these two plays offer essential reading for all ages.

Cover and description from Fantastic Fiction.

*****

Because seriously, how could I not be entranced by this? I loved William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope with a love that only other geeks could understand; especially those in the section of a Venn diagram showing the overlap of English lit geeks, Star Wars geeks, and theater geeks. I'm told that it's actually really fun to get together with a bunch of like-minded friends, assign parts, and do a table reading of it, but I don't have enough theatrical types in my circle of friends, alas.

Haunted Honeymoon (1940)

When Lord Peter Wimsey, amateur criminologist, marries Harriet Vane, professional writer of detective stories, they make a pact to give up crime. I'm not sure why they bother, since that's obviously never going to last, even before the former owner of their new country home is found dead in the basement the morning after they move into the house.

This movie version from 1940, starring a wonderfully miscast Robert Montgomery as Lord Peter and a rather more appropriate Constance Cummings as Harriet, is not available on DVD. The only way I got to see it was by pure luck; my boyfriend just happened to check the listings for Turner Classic Movies a couple of weeks before it was due to air, at 7:15 in the morning on a Wednesday. We checked to see that the VCR still worked, bought a blank videotape (still available at Walgreens), and I started taping it before I went to work.

I'm glad to have seen it. I now have some recording of every Peter Wimsey story committed to film: the Ian Carmichael versions of Clouds of Witness, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, The Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, and The Nine Tailors from the 1970s, and the Edward Petherbridge versions of Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and Gaudy Night from the 1980s, all of which I bought on DVD, and this odd little version of Busman's Honeymoon.

But it is odd, and the changes they made to the characters of Peter and Harriet are the oddest part. In the books it was obvious to both of them from the beginning that neither should have to give up a career for the other. The one thing that made Lord Peter think that maybe he ought to give up crime--his feeling that by pursuing monsters he was becoming a monster, and that sending a man to the gallows for murder was not substantially different from committing murder himself--is never mentioned here. Nor does his PTSD make an appearance.

I'd be quite interested in seeing a production of the original play now. I wish the BBC could have done this for television with Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, who had great chemistry in the three stories they did, but apparently they couldn't get the rights to it. Pity.

The King's Speech

While it is a source of embarrassment to himself and his family, in the larger scheme of things it doesn't seem like too much of a disaster that Prince Albert, Duke of York, known to his family as "Bertie," suffers from a crippling stammer.  When elocution lessons using the methods of Demosthenes fail, Bertie simply resigns himself to withdrawing from public appearances.  His wife Elizabeth is less inclined to leave it at that, and hunts up an unconventional Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, whose approach combines physical exercises with a kind of psychological probing that affronts the buttoned-up prince. But Lionel gets results, and when Bertie's older brother is pushed into abdicating the throne, Bertie unexpectedly becomes King George VI.  And the King must speak to his people.

I knew as soon as I heard about this movie that it was going to be right up my alley.  I didn't know much about the storyline; I'd heard quite a bit about the romanticized story of King Edward VIII, but not much about the younger brother who had to pick up the pieces after the abdication. And of course, I'll watch just about anything if it has Colin Firth in it.

I loved this movie.  For a while I was afraid that it wouldn't even play in my town; we only have a couple of multiplex theaters, and a lot of the time it seems they can't spare even one screen for a small period drama.  But when The King's Speech started getting all those award nominations and Oscar buzz, we finally got it here.  And I finally found a friend who also wanted to see it; she's British, as it happens, and was glad that the film presented Edward VIII as kind of a jerk.