How to Go to the Movies

Mr. Crisp goes to the movies with "our Mr. Steele" of Christopher Street Magazine (for which Mr. Crisp was a film reviewer), and provides us with a slew of amusing and insightful comments.

There is nothing quite like an acid-tongued queen as critic!

Crisp on "Miss Crawford"*: "Age could not wither her nor custom stale her infinte monotony."

*He refers to everyone this way: "Miss Crawford", "Mr. Welles", "Monsieur Depardieu", even "Mr. Divine"!!

So which is better, the book or the movie? Says Crisp, and I agree, "It is impossible to produce a satisfactory film from a really good book. What renders literature great is at least partly its power to evoke places, faces, objects so that we see them with the eyes of the imagination, which bestow show more on everything the luminosity of a stained-glass window. Mr. Proust says of the jewelry worn by the Duchess of Guermantes that it looked like tiny glasses of claret. In the movie, even if we had seen actual rubies, we would have beheld them with the eyes in our skulls. We could have praised the thoroughness of the art director, but we would have experienced no wonder." show less