Stella @ Sixth & I Synagogue (+ Afterparty with a "Wet Hot American Summer Screening")Film Screening: Bitter Sweet @ Library of Congress
by Svetlana 
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| April 11, 2008 | ||
| 7:00 pm |
Friday, April 11 (7:00pm)
Bitter Sweet (British and Dominions Film Corp./United Artists, U.K., 1933). Dir Herbert Wilcox. Wrt Lydia Hayward, Wilcox, Monckton Hoffe, from the operetta by Noël Coward. With Anna Neagle, Fernand Gravey, Miles Mander, Clifford Heatherley, Esmé Percy, Ivy St. Hélier. (93 min, b&w, 35mm)
Noël Coward’s operetta gets its first big screen treatment by Irish-born British producer/director Herbert Wilcox. (As for the MGM version, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, released in 1940, Coward wrote, “It is, on all counts, far and away the worst picture I have ever seen.”) Wilcox intended Bitter Sweet as a star-making property for Anna Neagle, his lovely young protégée. Thanks to this film and others she made after it, Neagle became a show business institution in the U.K. Today Bitter Sweet has many other attractions beyond the leading lady’s dewy appeal, principally its beguiling music and its evocation of a bygone world. The depiction of café life in Vienna is full of charm, but with a slight tinge of menace.
free as always
http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/pickford/pickford-current.html
