Word: leigh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HIGH HOPES Directed and Written by Mike Leigh...
Maybe Mike Leigh's High Hopes is too realistic and too intricate to be called a nursery rhyme for moderns. But he and his actors and designers do push out beyond the purely naturalistic. All the figures in his dismal urban landscape carry a carefully calculated moral weight, and their story is clearly intended as a microcosmic portrait of contemporary English life. So call it, perhaps, a fable on the sneak. And call it something else too: yet another carefully handmade ornament of the new British cinema, which includes such small recent marvels as My Beautiful Laundrette; Rita...
...Leigh, whose rigorous improvisational techniques have made him a guru of British theater (Goose-Pimples) and TV (Abigail's Party) for two decades, brings to his work the same anti-Thatcher animus that energizes much of today's British cinema. But unlike Laundrette and the rest, High Hopes derives much of its energy and some of its best comic strokes from a conscious, open acknowledgment that to be postmodern is also to be post-Marxist. In a time when people rise and fall freely, unhindered by traditional class structures, they become, according to Leigh, quite unhinged by their inability...
...beginning the greatest year of its Golden Age. In fact, it was to be the most memorable twelve months in the history of the American cinema. There was Gone With the Wind, of course, whose production attracted more intense public curiosity than any other film ever made. When Vivien Leigh -- beautiful, talented, but indisputably English -- was cast in the role of the Old South's own Scarlett O'Hara, thousands of Americans reacted with patriotic fury, as if the Redcoats had burned Washington again. "Why not cast Chiang Kai-shek and change the part to Gerald O'Hara?" a correspondent...
...Charles in The Thin Man series, slept in widely separated twin beds, clad top to bottom in pajamas or nightgown. Such now innocuous four-letter words as hell and damn were proscribed, and Gone With the Wind titillated and sometimes shocked audiences with Clark Gable's final words to Leigh: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn...