Marnie and Sophia

Oh, hell! Just a quick-fast addendum to my previous long-ass letter:

The enclosed photocopy is taken from the original source for what has become one of my very favorite of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, Marnie.

Marnie began life as a 1961 novel by British author Winston Graham, with all the characters and settings originally placed in England. I was delighted to discover that this decades-old book was sitting on one of the CPL’s branch shelves and immediately sent for it and enjoyed reading it—in the book, Marnie herself is the narrator—until I came to page 100 and came across that startling bit of dialogue between Marnie and Mark Rutland, the love interest (played with vivid intensity in the 1964 movie by a ruggedly sexy Sean Connery).

You can see where I’ve highlighted the part that threw me for a loop. I gasped, blinked, re-read it and put the book down for a minute, wondering if I really just read what I just read.

See what you think. Marnie was written by a white male, and in the complacently racist Britain of ’61 at that... On the other hand, Americans have often been befuddled by British-isms and English slang—could the word really have meant something different..? Perhaps..?

Still. Wow. Rather shocking, at least to me…

Okay! That’s it! We’re done!

Ciao for now Michelangelo! TCM is having a Sophia Loren festival this month—at this moment I’m watching one of her best, 1963’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, as I type this. Great movie, even if you don’t understand a word of Italian, and Loren, then 28, is at the height of her astounding Neapolitan beauty—no. I tell a lie, as the English like to say.

Loren is stunning here, especially in this, "Mara," the best-remembered of the trio of tales, in which she sends favorite co-star Marcello Mastroianni into screeching paroxysms of ecstasy as she performs the playful striptease seen ‘round the sixties cinema world; but she truly reached the summit of her magnificence several years later in 1967’s exquisite Italian fairy tale More Than A Miracle opposite Omar Sharif, who if anything is almost as pretty as Loren. The first time I ever saw More Than A Miracle, back in 1994 when I was living on 47th and Lake Park, my jaw dropped, literally, when Loren first appeared on screen. I’d never seen her so ravishingly beautiful. Those lips! Those eyes! Those cheekbones! (Angelina who???)


Anyway—later, babe. Ciao Bella.