Word: badly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...time when violence and sex are the dual sellers at the box office, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang looks better than it is simply because it's not not all all bad bad...
Happily, in piecing together this story, frequently through quotations from Erne's outraged letters to her mother, British Biographer Mary Lutyens goes beyond mere sex, or the lack of it, to the daily arena of a marriage gone irretrievably bad. She examines relentlessly the small social grievances, the resentful pinprick rivalries that gradually engulf and demean everyone concerned. In the orgiastic 1960s, Ruskin's sexual abstinence would be regarded for Effie as a fate only slightly better than death. Effie lived in an age inclined to view "all that" more as a duty than a cheerful privilege, however...
Millais sided with Effie, but he is a bad witness. He traveled in Scotland with the Ruskins to paint John's portrait, and his letters, which had steadily praised Ruskin, abruptly shifted to bitter criticism at precisely the time when he seems to have fallen in love. An extraordinary and crucial figure was Effie's precocious ten-year-old sister Sophie, who carried scabrous tales back and forth among Effie, Ruskin and Ruskin's parents. At one point, Sophie told Effie: "He says, you are so wicked that he was warned by all his friends...
Evil has fallen on bad days. In an age of H-bombs and death camps, its influence in the world has hardly diminished. But men's ways of thinking and talking about evil have altered. The fine old dramatic metaphors, from the Serpent in the Garden to Gustave Doré's sulfurous Lucifer, have lost their power to terrify. Yet modern substitutes are equally unsatisfying. Social scientists reduce evil to data. Intellectuals expose its banality. The public seems able to consider the demonic only in the harmless guise of Rosemary's Baby. Like nearly everything these days...
...camera doesn't help the actors out of their predicament. This is the first major film in a long time with noticeably bad editing--too fast in the action scenes, too slow and repetitive during the interminable quarrels. The Panavision closeups are appealing, especially O'Toole's leonine face and downcast eyes, but there are far too many. Had the camera roamed somewhat it might've caught more of the period feeling, as in Welles' Chimes at Midnight. As it is, the few long shots are obtrusive reminders that we are outside the whole story--like a piece of scenery...