13 November 2020.
Since you won’t find any big screens this month, relax in your favorite armchair or sofa and try to download these marvellous oldies. I thought I’d pick you a few romantic dramas and comedies to ease the mix of confinement and dark skies. The three old classics are simply superb, for the 1930s and 40s produced some of Hollywood’s best films, including “Gone With the Wind” and “Casablanca”. The two newer ones are charming and light. Enjoy.
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY ***
Here’s a light-weight, wonderfully silly 2003 romantic comedy from the Coen brothers, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Clooney. Can’t get more beautiful than that, with both of them at the top of their looks and comic talents.
He is a ruthless California divorce lawyer and she is a top man-eater and gold digger. And they fall for each other, sort of. This is a good antidote to the November blues.
MOROCCO ****
This gem made in 1930 by Josef von Sternberg and starring an alluring Marlene Dietrich as a cabaret artist, a young Gary Cooper as a down-and-out Foreign Legionnaire and the always debonair Adolphe Menjou as a seriously smitten millionaire is set in a wonderfully imagined Morocco.
Their unique triangle is hypnotic both in its naive simplicity and its surprising depiction of unconditional love. This cinematic and moral lesson from ages ago doesn’t have a wrinkle on it!
NINOTCHKA ****
One of the greatest romantic comedies ever made, this Ernst Lubitsch film from 1939 stars the glorious Greta Garbo and a charming Melvyn Douglas. A deadly serious Russian comrade, played by Garbo, is sent to Paris on a diplomatic mission. Her discovery of the free world is complicated by her encounter with the sophisticated Douglas, her exact opposite.
With a brilliant screenplay by the gifted Billy Wilder, the rest is for you to discover or see one more time. Actually, any Lubitsch film is exceptional, such as “The Shop Around the Corner” or “To be or Not to Be”, with his German/American career spanning from 1914 through 1948.
WOMAN OF THE YEAR ****
The famous duo of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were a couple both on and off the screen for some 26 years, and made 9 films together. This one by George Stevens from 1942 was their first, and is about two reporters who meet, fall in love, marry and then begin a rivalry to see which is best at their profession.
The ins and outs of their relationship is way ahead of its time, with Hepburn playing an incredibly independent woman. There is wit, charm and marital battles galore, and it’s a delight.
THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY ***1/2
Put aside the hopeless title and fall into this heartwarming tale of a writer in London in 1946 who begins a correspondence with a literary group on Guernsey island and becomes fascinated by their war years under occupation by the Germans.
She feels compelled to visit the island, and so start some very intense relationships with the residents there. Lily James (of “Downton Abbey” and “MamaMia” fame) scintillates as the writer with an insatiable interest in the lives of these secretive islanders. And of course there is her heart which doesn’t know where it belongs. Another lovely romance by Mike Newell of “Four Weddings and a Funeral”.
Superb **** Very Good *** Good ** Mediocre * Miserable – no stars
By Neptune
Neptune Ravar Ingwersen reviews film extensively for publications in Switzerland. She views 4 to 8 films a week and her aim is to sort the wheat from the chaff for readers.

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Kirby says
I don’t know why this wonderful episode of “What’s My Line” showed up in your link to NINOTCHKA, but I really enjoyed it!