Director: George Stevens
Filmed partially on Lake Tahoe, a place of nice memories for me, this old Hollywood movie, a box office failure but awarded with 6 Oscars, really pissed me off. The main character, George Eastman, is constructed as a modernist tragic hero from a Camus play (the movie is actually based on Theodore Dreiser's novel "An American Tragedy" from 1925, the title is pretty clear). Going deeper, the plot is based upon the true story of Chester Gillette, who murdered his pregnant girlfriend in 1906. He was tried, convicted and executed in 1908. The ghost of the actual victim, Grace Brown, is said to haunt the house where she lived in New York. Instead of a good ghost movie we have an awful discourse on how unrealistic it is to break your class and status barriers in trying to dream of something that you can never achieve. Conservative bullshit at its purest this movie tells you nicely to be happy with what you have and never try to get more. Unless you want to deal with your tragic guilt of breaking divine rules. And we all know that you don’t want to do that, wouldn’t you?
and i didn't say anything about the women characters that are the most stereotypical boring uninteresting figures i've seen for a while...
No comments:
Post a Comment