LsDoorMat
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Crime Ring (1938) 7/10
Although it has its quirks, this little film acquits itself well and covers some original ground for a B crime drama. The film opens with a guy on the street asking people if they want their fortunes told. The fortune teller across the street says that he is in her territory and calls her "protection racket" to get rid of the interloper. They actually show up! They actually eject the interloper! It turns out that every fortune teller in town is in league with this protection racket and is ponying up 10% of their take to them. Now this is normally not how it goes. Usually some big bulky piece of muscle says - "Nice business you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it." The business is just paying to prevent the mob from smashing their business. But there is a method in the mob's madness.
They are using the fortune tellers to get their clients' signatures on small checks for payment of service and then transferring it to power of attorney papers via forgery to clean out the client's bank account. Or they are steering them towards worthless stock and a particular broker of that stock who is in league with the mob.
Enter newspaper reporter Joe Ryan (Allan Lane) who strikes a deal with the D.A. to go into the fortune teller business with a fresh face who will collect evidence to get the thieves. Joe sure has some friends in high places because he is also friends with Phoebe Sawyer (Clara Blandick), a wealthy widow who lost her grown son in a shipwreck and is talked into going to a fortune teller - one of the most crooked and clever of them all it turns out - by her well meaning maid to find out if her son is really dead. The problem is, Joe doesn't know any of this - can he get the thieves before they clean out his wealthy friend? Watch and find out.
There are some things that don't make a lot of sense in this film. First there is the crowded jail cell full of women in an all girl show who are looking at 90 days for - it is never said. They are certainly decently if tackily clothed. Was there a law against tacky sequined gowns in this town? It is among these girls that Joe finds his fortune tellers - an actress and a ventriloquist, Kitty (Inez Courtney). Now that ventriloquist turns out to be pretty important so pay attention to her. Then there is a murder that is never explained, but somehow the audience is supposed to get what happens due to the furtive glances of the assassin, who we don't even know is an assassin at the time. In the D.A.'s office it is explained that this guy has been murdered and I wondered - Who was that again? Then a dramatic touch that never pays off. One of the D.A's assistants says "He (murdered guy) was murdered because..." and then a knock at the door stops him and the motive is never explained! I can only figure that this was rushed out the door and that there was some hasty editing done. But the film works well in spite of this. Allan Lane carries off the main role of the clever reporter with good natured energy. I just wonder how the justice system in the town managed to handle anything less straight forward than jaywalking without him. All of the creativity in foiling the thieves comes from him. He's helped along with a great supporting cast - the best known being Clara Blandick, the rest being largely anonymous - all handling their parts well.
I'd recommend it. Don't let its B film status fool you.-
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Maybe this belongs here, maybe it doesn't. It's an anecdote involving Robert. One time I knew somebody who could get me a copy of 1930's "Puttin on the Ritz" He said he had the whole 90 minutes of it. Great! Because 20 minutes of the film were considered lost and only 69 minutes of it remained. The guy wrote back - Sorry I was wrong. The first 20 minutes are just two guys discussing the 69 minutes of the film that everybody knows survives. I asked - Who was discussing it? His answer- Roger Ebert and Robert Osborne, looking to be in the 1980s or so. Don't worry, he adds. I deleted the 20 minutes so you won't be bothered with fast forwarding through it. My reaction - AAAAAAAARGH! Gee I would have liked to see those two together discussing ANYTHING. And poof - just like that - gone forever.
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I think the thing that bothers me the most is that Robert Osborne never returned to the channel for a final goodbye party and formal tribute so he could really see how much all of his viewers an colleagues loved him. I'm sure he felt the love, but having him leave always with the faint promise of a return and then for him to die suddenly, it just all feels so incomplete.
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My dad bought me 50 Golden Years of Oscar back in 1980. I've read, re-read, and consulted it numerous times and still have it. RIP to a classy gentleman who brought classic Hollywood cinema into the homes and hearts of millions. That's a legacy to admire.
I bought his book 60 years of the Oscar in the late 80s. I bought it and wondered "Is that the interesting host on The Movie Channel?". I've bought every update since. It has all kinds of interesting trivia in it.
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Rest in peace Mr. Osborne. You were the definition of class. I've been a fan of yours since you were on The Movie Channel back in the 1980s. I'll never forget back in the 80s when I turned the channel to TMC and "Séance on a Wet Afternoon" was getting ready to play. I would have turned the channel were it not for your interesting introduction that made me want to see this film about which I knew nothing.
You will be sorely missed.
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hello,
anyone know why universal only gives westerns to the starz/encore channels and never any of their
other kinds of films from the studio era?
I havn't seen any studio era films on starz - let me in on this if there are some playing this month. I've only seen studio era material mainly on Encore Westerns, since the 1940s and 1950s were the heyday of that genre. You see some classic Hitchcock or James Bond films on the other encore channels, but that is about the extent of it. Keep an eye on that Encore Western channel. Last August on a Saturday night I saw that "The Virginian" from 1929 was playing. I sighed. Oh, it's probably the 1940's version with Joel McCrea. But I set my DVD recorder up nonetheless. It WAS the 1929 version looking better than I'd ever seen it! I hadn't seen it on TV since I was in high school on Christmas break back in the 1970s!
The bottom line is the starz channels probably don't want the studio era material.
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Lol the problem with the IMDB boards was way too much trolling. Literally every movie had a band of trolls ready to pounce. This place seems much more civilized.
I really like the community here, but I do miss having the boards for individual movies. I also signed up for moviechat.org which looks like a pretty close replacement for the IMDB boards, but I'm still deciding if I'll be an active poster there. It's a new site so hard to tell if it will stick around. I can only juggle so many sites at once (this, Reddit, a few other IMDB-like sites that popped up...). Has TCM ever thought of adding an individual board for each classic film? I think that could be a good idea.
Did you primarily stick to recent releases? The reason I ask is I was active on imdb before I was ever on the TCM message boards and I primarily stuck to older films and I never saw a troll. I'd maybe get somebody who didn't like my opinion and was a little rude about it, but it was just that one person that one time about that particular opinion. I was just wondering. The most common thing I would see is a thread that would say "Worst film ever". Then a bunch of people would show up to disagree, but they largely had substantive arguments not just put downs.
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Sounds like Trump might eventually jump into that fray.
Not to get too OT, but there is hardly a topic of discussion on the Washington Post that doesn't turn into a Trump-based free for all fight. Even if it is an article about recipes. If it has Russian dressing in it, Trump is coming up in the topic of discussion. Plus the writing on the Washington Post has dropped precipitously in quality since I first moved to the D.C. area in 1992. The journalism was once exquisite, but now it is very much influenced by Facebook, Twitter, the "I disagree with you thus you are wrong" school of journalism, and the drop in writing skills brought on by texting. I refuse to take seriously anybody who writes: "u should b sorry 4 thinking that" .
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"When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began allowing more than five films to be nominated for best picture, in 2009, it also changed the way the votes were counted. The system is called instant-runoff voting, and it’s designed so that the film preferred by the widest consensus of Academy voters wins.
Voters aren’t asked to pick their favorite film when they fill in their ballots; instead they’re asked to rank the films up for best picture from most preferred to least preferred.
When PricewaterhouseCoopers counts up those votes, its tabulators first sort the best picture ballots into piles based on first choice. If one film accumulates more than 50 percent of the vote, that film is the winner. If not, the film that received the lowest number of first-choice votes is removed from contention, and all its ballots are redistributed to their second choices. This process is repeated until a film has more than 50 percent of the vote, at which point a winner is declared."
Incredibly convoluted. A real CPA numbers game.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/academy-awards-best-picture-instant-runoff/
Not to start a pie fight here, but that would be a great way to decide elections.
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The TIme, the Place, and the Girl (1946) 6/10
I watched this because it had a middling rating on IMDb and yet was nominated for at least one Oscar because it was on Turner Classic Movies' 31 Days of Oscar. I always watch these and then look afterwards at what nominations the film got to see if I correctly guessed. This time I came up empty.
It's a good film to watch if you are recovering from a nervous breakdown because there is little to no real conflict of consequence going on. Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson - the Hope and Crosby of Warner Brothers - are going to open up a club next door to the home of opera singer Victoria Cassel and symphonic conductor Ladislaus Cassel, granddaughter and grandfather, played by Martha Vickers and S.Z. Sakall, respectively. I guess we can talk about the bizarre zoning that would allow a nightclub next to a mansion another time. Their manager (Donald Woods sporting a ridiculous looking mustache) tells Morgan and Carson that he will have them shut down because they are hindering his clients' ability to practice their kind of music in peace.
So Morgan and Carson invite Victoria and her grandfather over to listen to "their kind of music" and they admit there is nothing wrong with it. The real instigators of the trouble are the manager and the grandfather's wife, an ex opera singer herself, so the club is still shut down over the ignored protests of grandfather and Victoria.
The rest of the film is about Morgan and Carson attempting to "put on a show" instead of opening their club. Of course there are complications. Vicki and Morgan's character begin a romance of sorts, but Morgan tells her he is not the marrying kind. That issue is never settled by the way. There is a gold digging woman who is the image of Scarlet Johansson who is either helping or hindering the show financially depending on whether or not she thinks Morgan's character is sweet on her versus her desire take a Texas oilman (Alan Hale) for all he is worth. The eternal struggle of muscles versus money. So the main issues are will the show ever get enough financial backing to open and how will that happen, and will the trouble-making manager, who seems to be doubly threatened since he seems to have a thing for Vicki, thwart Vicki's involvement in the show and her involvement with Morgan.
One weird thing about the music - it turns out the film was nominated for best song for a very forgettable number. In fact, all of the numbers are pretty forgettable with the exception of the very hummable "Rainy Night in Rio". Also, all through this film, there is supposed to be a running argument about swing/jazz music versus symphonic music, with the swing music being what the show is supposed to be about and why the original nightclub was closed in the first place. The "show" that is the creation of Carson's and Morgan's characters consists of what I would call pseudo-symphonic music and production numbers tame enough for any garden variety MGM musical at the time.
Summarizing - I wasn't at all impressed by the music, although Dennis Morgan's voice is always pleasant to listen to. So it's both Morgan and Carson doing their usual comic schtick with Morgan being the smooth one and Carson being the cruder and more forward of the two that is the draw along with the well intentioned S.Z. Sakall also being pretty amusing. -
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I liked to use the imdb message boards a great deal, but I've been a member of the TCM boards since 2007. I really miss being able to go into any movie or for that matter an episode of a TV show and post a question, or an answer, or just an opinion. Facebook is no replacement for that and it never could be. What imdb flushed down the toilet can never be replaced. I never saw the trolls that they claimed were causing the problems, but then I didn't spend much time on the boards for the most recent films. I doubt somebody posting an opinion on a film from 1930 or asking a question about an episode of The Partridge Family would attract many trolls.
P.S. If you are ever itching for a good online fight I highly recommend the Washington Post message boards. That thing is mud wrestling 24/7/365. Just don't use bad language.
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Music in the Air (1934) 6/10
Three comrades without those nasty Nazis...
... and believe it or not that weirdness factor alone - the factor of a director (Joe May) and one of the writers (Billy Wilder) both being people who found themselves in the American film industry precisely BECAUSE of them fleeing Hitler's Germany and yet painting a picture of Germany in which none of these fascists exist - earned this one an extra star from me just for the curiosity of it all. Without that curiosity factor this is a rather mediocre film. In fairness, this film was adapted from a 1932 musical that was, of course, pre Hitler.
At first I believed that this was all taking place in another time. The initial small town setting in Bavaria with horse drawn carriages and the traditional German garb complete with lederhosen allowed me to believe that. But then the small town folk arrive in Munich and when I saw the modern buildings, automobiles, and modern fashions (1934 that is) I realized I was in present day Germany, and I was thrown for a loop.
The script is the typical output of early 30's pre Zanuck Fox which primarily made films for rural audiences and talked up the values of rural life. A small town Bavarian composer ( Al Shean as Dr. Walter Lessing) is honored by the town fathers with a financed trip to Munich so he can try and advance his music. His daughter Sieglinde (June Lang) will accompany him. Karl Roder (Douglass Montgomery), the town schoolteacher, and Sieglinde have an understanding, so naturally he feels protective. So he joins a group of mountain climbers and hikes over the mountains to Munich to look after them both.
Meanwhile in Munich a couple consisting of singing actress Frieda Hotzfelt (Gloria Swanson) and composer/actor Bruno Mahler (John Boles) are constantly feuding. In fact they say they have been feuding for seven years but have been involved all of that time, yet are not married. At about the same time they are at the height of an argument that, to tell you the truth, looks silly and contrived, in come the professor, his daughter, and Karl seeking the professor's old music publishing friend. Bruno's partner in writing the music for a new show has left town, leaving an opening for the professor to get at least one of his songs into the show. Gloria is attracted to Karl, and seems to want to make a gigilo out of him as she packs for Venice and begs him to come along. Bruno thinks that Sieglinde would make a great new star to replace Freida. Will big town life corrupt these Bavarian babes in the woods? Watch and find out.
There really is one good song in the bunch - "I've Told Every Little Star" - and fortunately that is the one that is repeated the most. As for Bruno and Freida, they are portrayed ridiculously. There seems to be no substance to their arguing, and even though they are given German names they sound and act as American as apple pie when the film took great pains to make everybody else in the cast sound German. I've seen John Boles in a number of roles in the 30's and even the 20's (The Desert Song) and he was always believable, so I guess I have to lay the blame on him coming across as a ham on the director. I could say the same for Ms. Swanson. This was her last feature film role until 1941, and then she had no other role in a feature film until Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard". I wonder if them working together on this film had anything to do with that?source - an old WNET tape that I copied to DVD
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Thursday, March 2
6:15 a.m. Voice In the Wind (1944). This Francis Lederer film looks interesting.
4:30 pm. Weary River (1929). I had never heard of this Richard Barthelmess, Betty Compson film. Frank Lloyd was nominated for the Best Director Oscar.
You'll like Weary River. It's part talkie part silent - what was called a "Goat Gland" film. However the talking portions are natural and don't have that overcoached dialogue feel to them that other goat glands did. See "Noah's Ark" (1928) for reference.
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Elizabeth (1998)
What do Yankee Doodle Dandy and this film have in common? They are both great films that take so much liberty with the truth that I doubt the real people upon which they are based would recognize their own lives! We'll never know about Queen Elizabeth I who died 400 years before the motion picture was born, but George M. Cohen, whose life is on display in Yankee Doodle Dandy, did screen the picture before release and his comment was - "Great film, who is it about?". But I digress. First SPOILER WARNING. Even if you know English history, because this film has lots of fiction in it.
Cate Blanchett is every inch a queen in this film. Elizabeth surely was in danger during her half sister Mary's rule who wasn't called "Bloody Mary" for nothing. Robert Dudley was the love of Elizabeth's life, and she likely didn't marry for good reason, especially if you look at what happened to her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, who lost her throne by becoming vulnerable through affairs and marriages of the heart. Dudley's first wife did die conveniently in 1560, leaving him free to marry Elizabeth if she had so wanted. But tongues wagged about the suspicious manner of Robert's first wife's death, as she died by falling down a flight of stairs. Dudley did remain a loyal friend to Elizabeth throughout the rest of his life, angering the queen when he married a second time in secret after waiting twenty years for Elizabeth. But life must go on right?
But this last paragraph is largely the truth, now for the movie. In this film Robert Dudley is still first in her heart, and he is shown to be a two faced horn dog unworthy of that affection. Her biggest threat is shown to be Mary of Guise, French born and Catholic ruler of Scotland who plays this role completely over the top, but is delightful nonetheless. She is taken down in a James Bond style operation by Walsingham, trusted adviser and head of a network of international spies who is not against getting his hands dirty himself. Walsingham was indeed a trusted adviser, although years later than shown, and Geoffrey Rush plays this part to perfection, although the actual Walsingham was not nearly as interesting as the character shown here. In fact Walsingham was only a year older than Elizabeth, and a happily married homebody. I think they gave the part to an actor in middle age so that he looked as experienced as he seemed. The cross dressing Duke of Anjou never came to England and never sought Elizabeth's hand, but it makes for a great theater.
Then there is William Cecil, played by Richard Attenborough, whose heart is in the right place - as in for England and for Elizabeth - but has ideas that constrain England as a second hand power looking to France or Spain for protection. Elizabeth retires him with honors in the film and looks more and more to Walsingham. In fact, Cecil was only 13 years Elizabeth's senior, not a very old man as shown here. Elizabeth never retired him. Only death did that, and then only less than five years before her own.
So enjoy the great acting, the perfect art direction and cinematography, the intrigue and the plots, and a...poisoned dress? But most of all enjoy Cate Blanchett's performance as she portrays Elizabeth as she evolves from a young girl uncertain of what to say before parliament to the point where she practices her speeches haltingly in private, into an iron maiden who shears her hair, wears a wig, and paints herself with lead in an attempt to become a symbol of power, not the woman who has been looked upon as vulnerable to plots both at home and abroad. She gives up all hopes of personal happiness to be secure on her throne to tend to her first love, England, with all of this happening in a very compressed time period compared to what really happened, if it happened at all.-
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Messenger is a Universal film, and you'll grow old waiting for TCM to play it. There is a cheaply priced DVD set called "Kirk Douglas: The Centennial Collection" that you can get for under 20 bucks on Amazon that has eight movies on five discs. One of them is "The List of Adrian Messenger". It was put out by Universal so hopefully the quality is decent. Here's the link:
https://www.amazon.com/Kirk-Douglas-Centennial-Collection/dp/B01DKC2A2U
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I took calculus in high school. I tested out of Calc I and II in college, and got put into Multivariable Calculus.
Unfortunately the professor was terrible.
Not to get off track, but I had the same experience. Fortunately, as an engineer, I have never had to figure out the volume of a teapot and pick the coordinate system in which to do the integration.
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Price Waterhouse Cooper - I'm sorry. "La La Land" won the popular vote but "Moonlight" won the electoral college. Happens all the time.
Maybe this belongs in the unpopular opinions thread?
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The Winston Affair (1964)
This film had a very interesting premise and a stellar cast, and that surprised me as the movies made by Fox in the ten years after mogul Darryl F. Zanuck abandoned the company to bean counters in 1956 were some of the worst films that the company ever made, and this film was made in that ten year period. Now Zanuck did return in the early 60's but Rome and 20th Century Fox were not built/rebuilt in a day.
Lt. Charles Winston (Keenan Wynn) is an American officer during WWII in India, sharing a camp with British soldiers during the time before they are to move out and start a campaign against the Japanese in southeast Asia. At the beginning of the film Winston takes his revolver, walks over to where the British officers are bunking and shoots dead unarmed British staff sergeant Quinn in the full view of witnesses, and then just turns around and goes back to his own quarters and turns out the lights. He probably went to sleep.
Enter stage left Robert Mitchum as Lt. Colonel Barney Adams, who has been appointed defense counsel for Winston. There are two competing pressures here. Apparently Winston's brother-in-law is a congressman and has been applying pressure - thus the high ranking defense counsel versus some random JAG representative, and the apparent motiveless killing of a British soldier by an American soldier is causing friction between the British and American troops when the focus should be on preparing to fight the real enemy.
So Adams - quick on the uptake - learns very fast that he is there to make a show of a defense in a trial in which the only acceptable outcome can be the hanging of Winston. But there are problems. Apparently the army psychiatrist who examined Winston first considered him insane, but was overruled by his commanding officer for no apparent reason. When Adams finds this out the psychiatrist is abruptly transferred to a remote army hospital. A nurse slips Adams a paper showing him the first psychiatrist's diagnosis, although it is an unsigned carbon copy of the original and destroyed report. And when Adams tries repeatedly to interview Winston he gets either stone silence, irrelevant ramblings, AND the motive - that Winston was a racist and did not like the fact that the British soldier he killed was "defiling the white race" by consorting with women of another race when on leave and bragging about it.
So the great irony here is that the armies involved in a world wide conflict to defeat powers that will ignore the facts to get the outcome they desire want their military justice system in this one case to ignore the facts to get the outcome they desire - that they are willing to hang a possibly insane man for the sake of allied cohesion.
Of course Mitchum is great in this role of the lifer army man who is faced with doing things that might damage his career for the sake of justice. Of course he has a love interest - the nurse who handed him the report. Because she looks Asian and this IS 1964, she makes a point of mentioning that she is half French and half Chinese. Wynn is doled out in small doses. Some people find fault with him being the killer and having such a small role, but I think it is to keep doubt in the viewers' minds - is he crazy, or was there some other motive and is he just faking it? Wynn has some important lines though such as "the real war is after the war - east versus west, black versus white". Brave words for a film released in a country at the beginning of an unpopular war and in the midst of the civil rights movement. Finally, Wynn as Winston refuses to take the stand - "Do you think I'm nuts?" he says.
So how will this all work out? Justly or not, and what is that justice? What exactly is going on with Winston in the first place? Watch and find out in this film set in WWII with undercurrents of what was going on in the United States - and worldwide - at the time.Source:FXM Retro, who every now and then does play a good movie rather than the dozen or so C- films it has in constant rotation.
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You didn't spray Raid in your face did you, joebug, before typing out your thread heading? Perhaps you watched DUMB AND DUMBER TO recently?
It should be 'TOO MANY MUSICALS'.
Well that's a bit harsh! Maybe it's a tribute thread - Here's "to many musicals"!
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A Place in the Sun (Paramount, 1951) - I don't know if Dave Karger actually does his own research for his intros/outros (what a concept!), but I've learned several things I didn't know by watching him. For this movie, I learned Montgomery Clift objected to the casting of Shelly Winters, telling George Stevens that she was too annoying, and Stevens informed him that annoying was the point. You know, if the temptation of all that wealth and easy living and Elizabeth Taylor at the absolute hottest she ever was in her entire life wasn't enough, even when Clift's George Eastman tries to do the right thing, Winters says and does everything wrong, making him feel even more trapped. It's a great performance, and Winters deservedly got an Oscar nomination. As for the movie itself, I've seen it many, many times to the point I'm kind of numb to it all. The thing that jumped out at me most this time was Raymond Burr was not quite Perry Mason-level in his lawyering, cutting Clift off repeatedly with "not likely!" and "hardly!" and swinging that oar around in the courtroom. He should have at least been cited for contempt of court.
Try to get hold of "American Tragedy" from 1931. It's an interesting precode take on this exact same story.
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This is an example of how two different people can have two profoundly different responses and interpretations of a movie.
That is my polite way of saying that I believe Calvinme has misunderstood the story and Catherine's character; I wonder how many times he's seen it?
It's made abundantly clear in the final scenes of The Heiress that Catherine is extremely bitter. When Lavinia accuses her of cruelty, she replies, while calmly finishing her needlework, "Yes, I have been taught by masters." What a great line, and how well it signifies Catherine's transformation from an eager innocent young girl to the stone-cold woman she's become.
Olivia de Havilland does wonderful work, showing this transformation. Her face looks different, hard, expressionless. And even more than her face,her voice changes. It becomes a cold flat voice, somehow deeper, certainly less girlish and happy, than the way she spoke before she was so profoundly hurt by the two most important people in her life.
I could be wrong - it's all left to the viewer's own interpretation - but, like Tom here, I get the feeling that Catherine has turned her back on life and its joys, and is going to spend the rest of her life in that house, with no one and no thing to love. (By "no thing", I mean she does not appear to have an "passion" for anything, that there's nothing to indicate she's going to engage with any kind of activity outside the four walls of her home.)
You are right, Calvin, when you say at least she "found her tongue". But it was only to use it to communicate her "dislike" of her father. There's nothing to indicate she's going to use her new maturity to pursue any kind of life beyond what she had with her father, after he dies.
I've seen it many times since age 10 Miss Wonderly, and I am a she, not a he. Calvin is a long dead but beloved Birman cat (1991 - 2005). This is a fine write up as always, but I feel we must agree to disagree.
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I dunno, calvinnme. While I can see what you're saying about "confidence" and how that trait in people makes them more attractive to others, I'm not so sure one can say she in effect "finally found herself through newfound confidence" more than one can perhaps say she would eventually "find that inner cold and remote father that was within her".
(...I mean sure, it was nice that she wised up a bit and stopped bein' a freakin' doormat and all, but then becoming so damn bitter isn't all that much of an improvement, ya know...I mean there IS such a thing as "a happy medium", ya know)
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I never found the new Catherine "bitter". I just think she wised up and started trying to do things that pleased herself rather than others. As far as her father goes, she merely disavowed him as he had always disavowed her. Once he was dead and gone, he was forgotten as far as she was concerned.
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Well said. I think that both father and daughter let their bitterness drive how they treated each other. The father was bitter that he lost his wife at a fairly young age and since his daughter isn't like her mom he love her with contempt.
The daughter was bitter that her father caused Morris to flee. Once she found out how much contempt her father had for her she shut down. But I agree that she should have forgiven her father. Such an act would have helped her heal and therefore she should have done so not as a gift to her father but instead herself.
While all that was sad, I also find the fact that she felt that even untrue love from Morris was better than no love at all to be just as sad.
I don't think that the daughter was bitter that Sloper caused Morris to flee. I didn't see bitterness in the long run with Catherine at all. She finally "found her tongue" and found herself. She realized that even one who showed her kindness -Livinia - held her in low esteem when Livinia's face sank after Catherine told her that Morris knew that her income would be cut by two thirds and that she and her father were done with each other. With Morris abandoning her she realized he did so because the money he wanted to marry no longer lived there. In the long run Catherine was a stronger more attractive person because she no longer went around licking the boots of others trying to get them to like her. That is shown towards the end when Morris returns and, although he is still probably the fortune hunter with a fictitious tale of what happened to him that night years ago, you can tell he sees this new confident Catherine as attractive in her own right.
P.S. I don't see Sloper asking Catherine's forgiveness even on his death bed. It was not in his character. And maybe this should be filed under the unpopular opinions thread, but I feel like a chump forgiving somebody who does not truly ask for it. I feel like I'm giving up a chance for (legal) revenge someday.
Our Members Tributes to Robert Osborne (1932-2017)
in General Discussions
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