“Well, what shall we hang: the holly, or each other?”
It’s a question that might arise at any dysfunctional family’s Christmas gathering, if not aloud then at least in the minds of the participants. But when that Christmas is in the year 1183 and that dysfunctional family happens to be royal, as is the case in Anthony Harvey’s 1968 film The Lion in Winter, it takes on a potentially literal meaning.
Continue reading “A Very Plantagenet Christmas: The Lion in Winter (1968)”
“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of ‘dignity’.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Continue reading “Duty, Dignity and Denial: The Remains of the Day (1993)”
Cinematic Scribblings 