Book to Reel: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

  

A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere… the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions…

Book to Reel: The Great Gatsby

   

Rarely have I looked forward to a movie as much as The Great Gatsby. The continual delay of the release was frustrating and heightened my anticipation. The main reason I’ve been so excited about it is pretty simple: Leo. I sincerely think he’s the finest actor working today. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, This Boy’s Life, The Aviator, Inception, Shutter Island…the list goes on. (Yes, I am aware that I left out Titanic. I meant to.) The 1974 big-screen version featuring Robert Redford isn’t horrible, but there are some serious problems. (Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan? What the heck?) The story was simply crying out for a remake, and who better to tackle the job than the amazing Baz Luhrman? I was beyond thrilled when I heard he was the director. But when you are anticipating a movie this much, the fear is that it won’t live up to the hype. Couple that with the so-so reviews, and I was really starting to get nervous. I don’t get out much (I have a million kids), so my plan to have a “mommy date” with a friend who is also a stay-at-home mom was getting bigger and more grandiose in my mind with each passing week. I had a lot riding on this! It was supposed to make up for lots of sleepless nights with a baby, a husband who works A LOT and isn’t often able to let me go have some adult time…basically, for me, a night out to the movies with a girlfriend is equivalent to an all-expenses-paid week-long vacation for a regular person…and just as rare. How awful if the movie didn’t turn out to be all I really needed it to be. But guess what? I loved it. Let me tell you why.

Book to Reel: A Christmas Carol for Scrooge

There are many film versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, some traditional, some modern, some with a twist. The truth is, I can watch any of them and enjoy it. It is such a powerful tale of redemption that it works regardless of casting, setting, or medium. Scrooge McDuck is as poignant a Scrooge as any. Bill Murray is funny and tender in the aptly named Scrooged (with John Forsythe clearly reveling in the Marley role). Jim Carrey delivers a lovely vocal performance in the 2009 animated version. I even enjoy Barbie in A Christmas Carol, not to mention the dozens of made for television versions featuring a looser rendition of the tale. But whenever I talk to people about A Christmas Carol, it usually seems like the first version they saw is their favorite, and that is certainly the case with me. In 1970, at only thirty-four years of age, Albert Finney portrayed the famous old miser in a musical adaptation (I do love a good musical!) simply titled Scrooge, and for me, he is the ultimate personification of the character.

Finney won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical for this role, and it’s easy to see why. He carries himself like a man in his sixties, stooping slightly, affecting a Bell’s Palsy-like curl to his lip and a high-pitched fussiness to his tone. His make-up and styling are brilliant. I can’t detect any cosmetics aging him; it is all so realistically applied, and the addition of sparse, greasy hair and dirty fingernails completes his metamorphosis. In the flashback scenes when he travels to his youth with the Ghost of Christmas Past, we see how young and handsome he really was at the time of the filming, making the juxtaposition of his younger and older selves all the more startling.

Book To Reel: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

In 1678, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the most famous allegory ever written, was published. This beautiful story, purported to have dropped into author John Bunyan’s mind by way of a vivid dream, forms the framework for the beloved classic, Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. As The Pilgrim’s Progress describes the Christian’s journey through this life, detailing the successes and failures, the times of stagnation and growth, so Little Women tells the story of four sisters growing up and striving to better their characters and become productive members of society. Many of the chapter titles in Little Women are taken straight from the text of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the book is discussed by the March sisters at the opening of the novel as they resolve to shoulder their burdens with grace. It has always disappointed me that as many times as this book has been filmed, I can’t recall a single version that includes any mention of The Pilgrim’s Progress. This is one of the reasons why none of the movies live up to the book, though the 1949 rendition starring June Allyson and Peter Lawford is my favorite.

Book to Reel: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

     


“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.” 

~ Cathy Earnshaw, Wuthering Heights

Book to Reel: Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind

 vs. 

“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were…”

Book to Reel: Jane Austen's Persuasion

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Colin Firth is extra dreamy as Mr. Darcy in the A&E adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Indeed, it is so well known that I hardly see any point in recommending that version. Now, I am not saying that I am never going to write an article about it, but really, do I have to convince anyone to see that movie? I mention this because recently, Legacy Romance took a poll asking about favorite male characters, and of course Mr. Darcy came to mind. But one participant in the poll mentioned Captain Wentworth from Persuasion. It seemed a strange coincidence to me as I had been thinking about Captain Wentworth that morning--specifically, Ciaran Hinds’ portrayal of him in the 1995 BBC production. My mind was made up! I abandoned my plans to review Jane Eyre and settled on Persuasion for this edition of Book to Reel.

Titillating Tattlers & Muckraking Madness: Social Reform in America’s Press

I worked in the advertising department of a local newspaper for five years, and in that brief time, I saw the decline of readership and popularity of newspapers. Granted, smaller papers are faring better than the nationals as people still want to read local news stories, but the internet is driving many papers out of business. Why wait for news when you can have it with a few key strokes? But imagine a time when that wasn’t the case, when newspapers were the new big thing and the main way people connected with the rest of the world. Of course, with the news came scandal, as well. I sometimes wonder at what is considered news these days when I am watching television--fashion, celebrity life, gossip and rumor mongering are all front and center more often than not, but this is nothing new--the tabloids have been around since the late 1800s.

I Could Hardly Wait to Keep Our Date This Lovely Easter Morning

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,

You'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade...

I love hats. I usually only wear them to church, so you’ll be sure to see me sport one five or six times a year on Sunday mornings because I think they are feminine and lovely and just plain fun. (I wish women still wore gloves all the time, too, and red lipstick and hose with a seam up the back, but since I don’t want to look like I’m in costume, I just stick with the occasional hat.) And of course I love to wear an Easter bonnet! Granted, my hat this year is a rather conservative straw number with an enormous black blow, but I love the fancier Easter bonnets women wear in the Easter Parade.

Book to Reel: The Magnificent Ambersons

The Amberson family is the richest, most magnificent family in town with only one grandchild, George Minafer Amberson. Georgie is spoiled, egotistical, and a complete narcissist, utterly incapable of seeing other people outside of their relationship to him--especially his mother. The entire town is by turns fascinated and repelled by Georgie, and many people long for the day when Georgie will receive his “comeuppance.”

The Magnificent Ambersons was published in 1918, and the great Orson Welles committed it to the big screen in 1942. Welles directed, produced, and wrote the screenplay. Like the novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, the movie was a great success, and it regularly makes the list of the best movies ever made. Many reviewers say it is superior to Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane. But the movie was surrounded by controversy. It was test screened and disliked by audiences, so studio executives demanded revisions and cuts. Welles complied initially, but did not make all of the adjustments that the studio wanted, so while he was out of the country, forty minutes of the film were cut and destroyed and the ending was changed to reflect a closer rendition of the novel.

John Rolfe: Virginia's First Gentleman

To Have and To Hold features a fictional version of John Rolfe, the man best known for making tobacco a viable commercial crop in the Colonies and for marrying the Indian Princess, Pocahontas. We meet him on page one as he comes to visit his friend, the protagonist, Ralph Percy, and counsels him to take a wife. The book opens in 1621, merely a year before Rolfe’s death. It is impossible to say how accurately Mary Johnston portrays Rolfe’s personality, but I enjoyed her characterization of him, and it prompted me to do some investigating and learn more about the actual man. Rolfe’s life was marred by tragedy, and if he bore it as well as the pen and ink version did, he was an admirable individual.

John Rolfe was born in 1585 in Norfolk, England. His first wife accompanied him on his original trip to Virginia. Their voyage was marred by a shipwreck, stranding them in Bermuda for some time. There, Rolfe’s first child, a daughter, was born, but she died in infancy. The shipwrecked travelers set sail again and reached Virginia in 1610, but Rolfe’s wife also died not long after they landed in the New World.

After arriving in Virginia, Rolfe began experimenting with tobacco crops and eventually was able to produce a tobacco that could turn a profit. According to Virtual Jamestown, “Rolfe's role in the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop insured his standing within the colony.”

Sex, Lies & Gunpowder: Scandal, Seventeenth-Century Style

An adulteress. A co-conspirator in an assassination attempt. Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, meant to blow up the House of Lords, along with the King. These are just a few of the people and events mentioned in Mary Johnston’s swashbuckling adventure, To Have and to Hold. Let’s take a look.

Frances Carr, Countess of Somerset, was one of the most reviled and talked about women of her day. She was first married at the tender age of fourteen in a political alliance to thirteen-year-old Robert Devereux. The two teenagers were separated quickly because of their youth, but by the time they were brought together again to consummate their marriage, Frances was in love with Robert Carr, the 1st Earl of Somerset, and her husband was ill with smallpox. She did everything she could to avoid sleeping with her husband, all the while claiming he was unable to perform his marital duties. She even had herself examined to prove her maidenhood was still intact, though some speculated that she duped the examiners by claiming modesty, veiling her face and at the last moment substituting a truly innocent girl in her place. Frances eventually won an annulment and was honorably married to Robert Carr, but it is no wonder that Ralph Percy, the hero of To Have and to Hold, resented his wife being mentioned in the same sentence with the Countess. And the scandal did not end with her marriage. She also poisoned Sir Thomas Overbury because he dared to counsel Robert Carr not to marry her. She was sent to the Tower, along with her husband, for seven years.

Fresh Brides Available! Hurry, Supplies Won’t Last!

Thomas Hart Benton's Brideship
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

"...the plantation can never florish till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the people on the soil." ~Sir Edwin Sandy, Treasurer Virginia Company of London, 1620

Mail order brides. The images these words conjure up are not entirely pleasant, and certainly not romantic! Our modern equivalent of the mail order bride seems to bear little resemblance to the women depicted in Mary Johnston’s romantic adventure, To Have and to Hold, and to the actual women who traveled to the New World in 1620 to start new lives by marrying Colonists. In Johnston’s novel, Lady Jocelyn Leigh is running away from a man named Lord Carnal (sounds like a fitting moniker for a pimp, doesn’t it?) and she is rescued by the ultimate hero, Ralph Percy. When she meets Percy in the courting meadow, the scene is tinged with valor and romance. But was there much romance for the real Jamestown brides?

Mary Johnston: Bestselling Author, Activist, Inspiration

Mary Johnston, author of To Have and To Hold, was born on November 21, 1870, in Buchanan, Virginia. Her father, Major John William Johnston , was a Civil War veteran, like many of her male relatives. Johnston wrote of her childhood:

“We grew up in a veritable battle cloud, an atmosphere of war stories, of continued reference to the men and to the deeds of the gigantic struggle.”

This was an important part of her home-based education, which included direction by her maternal grandmother and later, a governess. Reading comprised much of her instruction. Johnston was sickly from birth, and her inability to partake in physical activity fostered in her a life-long love of books. She especially enjoyed Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Shakespeare. While she was still a child, her family predicted she would be an author.

The Movie is Better Than the Book?! *Gasp!*

Recently, I read Washington Square with an eye towards adding that title to the Legacy Vintage Collection. Written by Henry James in 1880, it was purportedly based on a true story told to James by an actress friend. I love the movie version entitled The Heiress, and I certainly anticipated finding that the written word would be superior to the moving picture. Alas! This is one of those rare occasions when the converse is true.

The Heiress was filmed in 1949. I first saw it when I was a teenager, and the movie made quite an impression on me. Montgomery Clift’s fantastic good looks and Olivia de Havilland’s demure, understated beauty complement each other perfectly. Montgomery Clift is pitch perfect as the ne’er do well rake, Morris Townsend. That young man would never have fallen in love with such a dull stick as Catherine Sloper, de Havilland’s character, (of course, we know in real life neither would Montgomery Clift--he would never have fallen in love with ANY female, but that is a subject for another article) and we find that it is not love of the woman but love of her fortune that prompts Morris to relentlessly pursue the shy wallflower.

Meet Vintage Reader Contributor L.R. Blizzard

I love to read. I remember the first book I ever fell in love with- Goodnight, Moon. Something about the Great Green Room and the old lady whispering “Hush,” sparked my imagination, and I knew that once I understood how to decipher the words on those pages, I would be transported to another world. And I wasn’t disappointed. There is no greater vacation than the escape from reality one finds between the pages of a well-written book.

With enough imagination and a talented writer, you can be anyone, go anywhere, experience anything. Books are a buffer between us and the world. Who cares about waiting at the DMV if you’re holding Sue Grafton’s latest Alphabet Mystery in your hands? Long wait at the doctor’s office? Pull out your favorite battered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and visit with Boo Radley for a bit. The time will fly. It doesn’t matter how many times I read Gone with the Wind. I am still waiting for the day that I can believe with all of my heart that Scarlett really will get Rhett back. And when I need to laugh out loud and maybe shed a few tears, I take a trip to a little town called Lonesome Dove, where I always feel welcome.