The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Kerr Wotta Scorcher

Deborah Kerr has died, so naturally Britain's leading liberal newspaper is careful to note her role as a "sexy adulterous wife" in From Here to Eternity. "Her scene with Burt Lancaster on the beach with the waves washing over their bodies was considered on the verge of scandalous in its time", drools Mark Tran; after all, the American Film Institute named From Here to Eternity "one of the top hundred most romantic films of all time". Tran also mentions "the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan vehicle Sleepless in Seattle", which immortalised Kerr for a generation of Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan fans by heavily featuring An Affair to Remember. Kerr also appeared in The King and I and "even played a Bond girl in the 1967 version of Casino Royale." Now, that's what I call a legacy. When Julie Christie departs life's great stage, we can be sure that Mark Tran or something of the sort will be there to remind us of the sex scene in Don't Look Now, no matter what the merits of her acting elsewhere, or in the bits of Don't Look Now that he didn't understand and/or can't remember.

At the end of his piece, Tran is just about able to remember Kerr's roles in two films by The Archers, the epic Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and the exotic melodrama Black Narcissus; the former has no notable merit in Tran's estimation except that Kerr appeared in it "after switching to film", while the latter has the distinction of being the "breakthrough" role that sent her to Hollywood. Her outstanding performance in Jack Clayton's The Innocents, a version of The Turn of the Screw which turned Henry James' prim, prolix and stodgy novella into one of the cinema's best-ever ghost stories, is relegated to a picture caption, "The kids aren't all right".

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