We turned to TCM and caught the last part of To Kill A Mockingbird. Always a treat. I can't say the movie was as good as the book - with great literature, it just about can't be - but it was stellar.
So we were all snuffling over the fate of Boo Radley and the ending melancholy, and were ensconced in the sit-down-and-watch mode, and Robert Osborne comes on and talks about Peck in the next movie, Duel In The Sun, and how it's this classically done Western by David O. Selznick, all grand and big and bold. So we thought, must be a classic. Let's watch it!
I pause in my writing now to send an email to TCM demanding that 30 minutes of my life be returned to me.
It starts out "Prelude," looking past a rock on a literally painted landscape with boring violin music playing. What the hell? We waited for the movie to start. Nope. After four or five minutes, all right, the joke's on us, and we start flicking to other channels, coming back to this one to check out whether life has come to this puzzling coma of a start.
After a couple years, or maybe 15 minutes, of this, then we get some sonorous oration that barely rose to an Ed Wood level of florid zero-sum prose, and "Overture," different painting, and now instead of boring violin music, it's boring orchestral music. What the..... back to the channel surf.
And after this dreary torture of the senses, then the scene switches to some Hollywood home. Not the way to start out a Western. More senseless soliloquy.
Then to the alleged movie. To say it made no sense is like saying the sun is hot. As Dorothy Parker so famously described, the characters and acting ran the gamut from A to B. Either the delivery was overstated in a way that would've had William Shatner shaking his head, or it was lifeless, as though the actor had shown up for a paycheck and couldn't wait to hear "Cut!" so he could hit the commissary and chat with colleagues. The sets were stupid and offputting, and the bit players obviously harvested from the Selznick Stereotype Warehouse.
After a half hour - in other words, about 29 minutes longer than human decency should've prompted me to leave - I gave up. Jennifer Jones' shrieks and expressions had obliterated her sexual attraction, and Gregory Peck hadn't even shown up yet. Grandma stayed on, hoping that a rose might bloom out of this fetid gathering of sewage, but after another 20 minutes of saintly patience, she gave up trying to get a thread of cogent plot and character from the offerings.
TCM. Turner Classic Movie. In this case, take the Clic from the second word, and you've got it.
