Just finished watching 'Now Voyager'.
Now, before you (or indeed anyone else) starts on, yes, I DO know that it is regarded by many as a classic movie from the golden era of Hollywood. Yes, I DO realise that lots of critics and fans regard it as one of the high points of both Bette Davis' and Paul Heinreid's careers.
And yes, I REMEMBER only too well that loads of women from my grandmothers' generation flocked to the cinema to see it and sat there in the dark steadily chomping chocolates as they clutched their tiny lace hankies to their eyes and wept daintily at all the stirring nobility and rampant self-sacrifice unfurling before them on the silver screen.
Yet how Olive Higgins Prouty managed to make millions writing books like that, I cannot fathom.
I'm not sure if it's me, wilfully misunderstanding the works of fiction from another era. Or whether it was the scriptwriter, being forced by the suits in the top office to recast many of the author's themes and subtexts to fit better with popular public opinion about spinsters at the time the film originally came out.
Or perhaps it's the revolutions of the Sixties that stand in the way between Prouty's zeitgeist and ours.
But I must confess to finding myself quite infuriated by many of the themes and arguments put forward in that film.
Having a selfish, domineering old bat of a mother who seems to regard her youngest child as a heaven-sent combination of recompense for suffering a generally crap life and guaranteed source of support in her old age is a very serious affliction, yes. I imagine it quite probably would be enough to drive any sensitive and intelligent person three-quarters of the way into a nervous breakdown.
But as a life-long fat awkward old bat in glasses, it leaves me flabbergasted.
Are we supposed to conclude that women who need to wear glasses for whatever reason end up so traumatised by the experience that they go mad? It's all very well for Charlotte and Tina in the film not to need theirs any more. However, at the ripe old age of 43, I still require my short sight and astigmatism to be corrected in some way or other every single day - or else I keep bumping into all the furniture and can't be trusted to cross the road unattended.
Now Tina seemed to be wearing braces on her teeth, so even at that remote period in history, Americans were determined to help young teenagers improve their physical appearance. If I remember rightly, it may have been about this time that Laurence Olivier had to wear contact lenses to change his eye colour for some role or other - and he said that they were pretty uncomfortable during this era.
So fair enough - but why not try and find some more funky, flattering glasses for the two women to wear, then? Or why not have the guts to wear your glasses WITH all the incredibly chic little outfits the wardrobe department decided in its wisdom to bestow upon Bette after she recovered from her nervous troubles?
(And while we're on the subject - who suggested to Bette's character that she would look a lot better wearing black and white Orry-Kelly gowns, pearl and diamante earrings and a kick-arse red lipstick? If this was such an important element in her recovery - why can't we see the bloody makeover onscreen? Or are women 'instinctively' meant to realise all this themselves, once their minds are working 'properly'? If the latter, hand me that credit card - I'm going shopping for the good of my health!!!!!!!!)
Next up are the two men Bette gets to choose between.
Well, if Charlotte just plain doesn't love (and doesn't seem to fancy either, by the looks of things) poor Elliott, she is quite right to give him his marching papers. Sticking around wouldn't be fair to either of them.
However, Paul Heinreid is a completely different kettle of fish altogether.
Okay, okay, I appreciate that mainstream films back in those days couldn't really get away with showing a 'respectable' woman getting it on with a married man, for fear she would have been condemned by a large majority of the audience as 'wicked' and 'immoral'.
And this would be despite the fact that he was a good, moral bloke whose relationship with his wife had sadly gone down the toilet big time.
But don't tell me that she could then sublimate all her pent-up sexual desire and romantic longings for him into becoming the unpaid foster-mother for his troubled teenage daughter. Don't tell me that he would find the sacrifice easy, either. Or that his daughter Tina wouldn't begin to notice that there was something a bit strange about the relationship between her dad and her foster-mum. Or that Tina's mum wouldn't kick up a fuss and a half once she found out about the fostering arrangement.
And if Charlotte suffered terribly through being lumbered with a very troubled mother of her own, why does she 'need' to redeem herself by fostering a teenage girl who's in danger of repeating her own history?
I'm afraid I could see why Sylvia Plath had a bit of a laugh describing how Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar had to go down to the local library to borrow copies of Philomena Guinea's works 'as the college library didn't seem to stock them for some reason' and how they were full of immensely long, suspenseful questions like: 'How could he possibly marry her, if he learned of the child Elsie hidden away with Mrs Rollmop back on the farm?'.
(Apologies if my memory has ended up rewriting any of these quotes slightly. I'm a hack and my brain is determined to recast everything that's fed into it in its own image. I'd be no good transmitting the oral heritage of my culture down the generations.)
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