Word: ryder
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Charles Ryder's Schooldays is lost and found in England...
...going back to shortly after his death [1966] to look for evidence, while trying to renegotiate some of the paperback royalty rates." Suddenly the familiar rustle of contracts became the startling flutter of serendipity. "Out of the 1970 file," says Sissons, "dropped a typescript of Chapter I of Charles Ryder's Schooldays...
...young man who does the glimpsing is Brideshead's narrator, Charles Ryder (Irons), who finds his army unit bivouacked by coincidence on the grounds he knows so well. He had been introduced to the house years earlier by one of its inhabitants, Sebastian Flyte (Andrews), an Oxford classmate renowned for "his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds." In the flashbacks arising from Ryder's bittersweet memories, Sebastian gives long, champagne-inspired lunches in his rooms and, in an extravagant undergraduate fantasy, carries with him everywhere a large Teddy bear...
...Ryder soon falls in love with the entire Flyte family and becomes for a time almost an adopted son. His own widowed father (Gielgud) is comically austere in his affections; when his son returns to their London home after 15 months, he looks up in unhappy surprise and says, "Oh, dear." The Flytes, by contrast, are warm and charming. Their only fault, in Charles' conventional Anglican eyes, is their obsession with their exotic, un-English Catholic religion...
...Marchmains' way of life is infectious, and the first several hours of Brideshead are a glorious feast-even better, no doubt, than those served up in Sebastian's rooms at Christ Church college. The acting is scrupulous. Gielgud's scenes with Irons in the Ryder dining room in London are small comic masterpieces of timing and nuance. Olivier's grand scenes come at the end, when Lord Marchmain comes home to die at Brideshead...