October Monday, Early Afternoon

Quiet, blessedly. And cloudy.

I'm watching a rather grainy VHS copy of Joseph Losey's 1975 film The Romantic Englishwoman, starring Glenda Jackson, Michael Caine and Helmut Berger. When this concludes I will flip the switch to DVD (cleaner sound and picture) and begin John Schlesinger's elegiac Sunday, Bloody Sunday, also starring Jackson and the great Peter Finch--the great, late Peter Finch, who died more or less on the eve of his 1977 Best Actor Academy Award win for Sidney Lumet's Network. I think it was Lumet who directed. Wasn't it? If not it should have been.

How I miss the cinema of the seventies. I remember that time just well enough to know not to romanticize it too much--there was a fair amount of schlock--there is every era--but so many good and great movies were being made then that it's come to feel like a cinematic Golden Age. Independents, young turks, and the masters of European cinema that inspired them were either still in their prime or just hitting stride, creating new language and new rules and releasing modern masterworks like The Last Picture Show, The Godfather Parts I&II, A Woman Under the Influence, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, The Conformist, The Conversation, Amarcord, Jaws, Fear Eats The Soul, Scenes From A Marriage, Days of Heaven and My Brilliant Career. Even the living monuments like Hitchcock still had a trick or two up the sleeve with Frenzy and Family Plot. Movie-going was absolutely necessary back then; you felt that cinematically anything could happen.

Here is Michael Caine in Romantic Englishwoman. He looks great in this movie. This is post-Alfie, post-Ipcress Files, post-Gambit. Here he's older, successful, sophisticated and (still) cynical; this was his Get Carter, Sleuth and The Man Who Would Be King period. In Romantic Englishwoman he plays a wealthy, chauvinistic novelist, an insecure, self-regarding prick who loves his wife--a wry, restless Jackson--but is so fearful of losing her to a handsome gigolo she meets by chance during a solo getaway--the German heartthrob Berger--that he effectively goads her into an extramarital affair.

And Jackson....Glenda May Jackson. Words fail me. She is now a politician--a Member of Parliament (Labour Party) since 1992--and Britain's political gain has been every movie-lover's loss. As an actress Glenda Jackson was such a force of nature--there's never been anyone remotely like her and likely won't be again. She was unique; passionate and iron-willed before such strength was considered a virtue; brazen, brainy, and a sexual powerhouse. In Women In Love she was the mythical Free Woman come to defiant, indomitable life, in The Music Lovers (both directed by Ken Russell, whom she greatly admired) she is a ferocious avenging angel. Yet she could be marvelously funny, giving wonderful, wittily feminist performances opposite George Segal in 1973's A Touch of Class and Walter Matthau in 1978's House Calls. It figures that she played Elizabeth I, not once but twice, in 1971's Mary Queen of Scots opposite Vanessa Redgrave (another strong, independent lady of British cinema and theatre) and again that same year in Elizabeth R, a beautifully produced mini-series presented in 1972 to American audiences on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre.

I miss seeing movies and television, I miss movies and television productions being made, with Glenda Jackson in them.