BEFORE: Kari Matchett carries over from "Angel Eyes". I kind of hate to lose "Angel Eyes" from the list, because it's the link between two sci-fi films in the same franchise, "Cube 2: Hypercube" and "Cube Zero", now they won't be connected at all, and I may never be able to follow-up "Cube", which I watched many years ago. C'est la vie.
Here's the line-up for Wednesday, 2/19, Day 19 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar":
Best Editing Winners and Nominees:
5:45 am "Air Force" (1943)
8:00 am "Odd Man Out" (1947)
10:00 am "Z" (1969)
12:15 pm "The Dirty Dozen" (1967)
3:00 pm "The Great Escape" (1963)
6:00 pm "Bullitt" (1968)
Oscar Worthy Teens:
8:00 pm "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955)
10:00 pm "The Last Picture Show" (1971)
12:15 am "American Graffiti" (1973)
2:15 am "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" (1968)
4:30 am "The Human Comedy" (1943)
I was at 86 seen out of 208, and I've seen 6 out of Wednesday's 11: "The Dirty Dozen", "The Great Escape", "Bullitt", "Rebel Without a Cause", "The Last Picture Show" and "American Graffiti". Hey, 2 Steve McQueen films in a row, you just KNOW somebody over at TCM wants to get in on the actor-linking game, right? SO now 92 seen out of 219 takes me up a bit to 42%.
THE PLOT: An arthritic Nova Scotia woman works as a housekeeper while she hones her skills as an artists and eventually becomes a beloved figure in the community.
AFTER: This is maybe a bit of a tough one because it doesn't feature "love" in the modern sense that we've all come to know it, it's set back in the 1930's in Nova Scotia and somebody maybe really thought about what it meant back then to be in a relationship, it was a different time and things were different and people had different priorities in life. People had to clean their houses and have some job that was vital to the community, and they thought about what it meant if they were married and what it meant if weren't, and maybe there was more focus on what other people told you about how God felt about your life and what that all meant. Even in a small town in Nova Scotia, it meant something if other people in town thought you were odd or had a relationship that wasn't normal, whatever that means, and I guess people thought if two people were living together without being married then God would send bad weather to their village or something, like he did with Sodom and Gomorrah.
Also, men didn't have emotions until the 1960's, or if maybe they did then they weren't allowed to express them, that meant they were soft and not normal, so that messed up a lot of generations of people, and caused a greater divide between men and women than there needed to be. Also there were no cell phones, texting, or internet, people shopped in small general stores or local markets and not big chain stores, and if you wanted to meet a life companion you had to go down to the market and post a paper notice to a bulletin board with a thumbtack that said you were looking for a cleaning woman, and maybe more, because you were too busy catching fish all day and trying to hang on to that service niche in your community to look after your own house and farm. Look, if you were a woman and had bad arthritis and your brother sold your family home, that probably sounded like a pretty good arrangement, being a cleaning lady for a cold, emotionless, fisherman who was very particular about the cooking and cleaning, but not enough to actually do those things himself. Well, he's got a job to do, damn it.
Personal happiness? Fulfillment? Did they even have these things back then? There was a Depression going on, so I don't know what people thought about these things, or if everyone was just focused on getting by, and maintaining the chicken coop so they didn't have to buy eggs at the store - oh, that's coming back in style, I guarantee it with the egg-flation we're seeing now. I saw a news story about families in L.A. renting two chickens at $10 a day each so they could get a dozen eggs in a week's time without paying $6 per dozen at the store. I'm not sure that the math holds up there, but it's where we find ourselves. You know, why not spend thousands of dollars to move your whole family out of the city to a little farm in Canada so you can save a few hundred each month in rent and then you can work remotely and also be farmers? I'm sure that makes financial sense in the long run, give it a try and let me know how that goes. Let's all get back to good old family values, like tending the land and also being able to smack your wife around when she gets too talk-backy.
Maud Lewis was a real "outsider" artist, but obviously had some health problems and family issues, not just her brother selling the family home but also after she got pregnant while out partying her family just sold her baby, which was another thing different about the 1930's that I don't think you can do now, treat babies as currency. But they told her that the baby was born deformed and then died, really they just didn't think she could handle the responsibility of raising a child, what with her medical condition and also never holding down a job and being like a weird artistic / autistic type of person. So yeah, there's that. Everybody seemed to know what was best for her, and then she went and did her own thing by moving in with a surly burly fisherman who showed her love or at least tolerance. But she spent a lot of time by herself and developed a style of painting that people seemed to like, and once she appeared on TV her art really took off, the only downside was that her husband/boss didn't like the way he looked on TV and then blamed her for that.
I wonder which generation landed on the idea that marriage is all about love, but it's not a helpful way of thinking, because marriage is more than just that, it's an economic relationship. It's, like, let's pool our resources because together we have more stuff, more income, more opportunities, plus it's easier to buy groceries for two, you don't have to make as many trips, if that makes sense. And most meals are shareable, plus I can sneak out on my day off and grab just enough TV dinners, bread and milk to make it to the weekend. There should be love in marriage, of course, but there's more to it than that, and these days people tend to cut bait when the love fades just a little, because that seems easier than making a non-working thing work again. So then they never get to settle in to a stable but perhaps slightly boring routine where two people have complimentary strengths, like one may be better at cooking and the other's better at ordering take-out. Or one person has a knack for driving, and the other person has better navigational skills, and better taste in driving music. Or I have a house, you have a car, together maybe we have everything we need.
By today's standards, it's kind of weird here how this couple came together, like him hiring her to be his cook and cleaning lady, and then providing her room and board, so it's almost like "wife" was in parentheses or something. And they end up sleeping together in the same bed just because the house was so small - a likely story, maybe Everett knew what he was after all along, and maybe Maudie was OK with that, it's maybe tough to say. But I guess there's a lid for every pot, as some people say. He's good at catching fish, but not so good at keeping records for his customers, so Maud steps in. She develops an interesting painting style, but not so good with negotiating their value with buyers, so Everett steps in. Stronger together, see what I mean?
This film screened at the Telluride Film Festival in 2016, and then at the Toronto International Film Festival and several others around Canada, like the Atlantic Film Festival, the Calgary International Film Festival and the Vancouver International Film Festival. I think I've entered films in all of those. I caught it on the NYC PBS station, channel 13, on some Saturday night when they usually screen one classic film and one "indie", that's where I picked up several of this year's upcoming selections. I just have to keep remembering to check the listings before Saturday night rolls around again.
Also starring Sally Hawkins (last seen in "The Lost King"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "A Midnight Clear"), Zachary Bennett (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Gabrielle Rose (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Greg Malone, Lawrence Barry, Billy MacLellan (last seen in "Nobody"), Marthe Bernard, David Feehan, Nik Sexton, Judy Hancock, Mike Daly, Brian Marler, Denise Sinnott, Tom Dunne.
RATING: 5 out of 10 sardine cans with paint in them
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