It is currently Tue Apr 20, 2021 6:03 am
Moderator: surfer
Glad you liked it!Dan Warburton wrote:Il Giovedi, Dino Risi, 1963
Watched this last night, and agree wholeheartedly with the above. Terrific acting (Chiari sure, but also Roberto Ciccolini as the kid), very sharp script and great camerawork. And yes, a cracker of an endingI can imagine a big budget, horrible Hollywood remake - let's hope it never happens.
http://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=142845&ev=mbDan Warburton wrote: (from the album The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes – good luck to you finding a copy of that)
Not as hard to find as I was led to believe!Alastair wrote:http://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=142845&ev=mbDan Warburton wrote: (from the album The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes – good luck to you finding a copy of that)
Good pic, now I've figured out the twist looking forward to watching it again before long..
In High Spirits, a busload of American tourists arrive at a castle that's advertised as the most haunted place in Ireland. The producers may have been hoping for something on the order of National Lampoon's Irish Vacation with a jigger of Ghostbusters. But even though they whacked away at the film, it's still clear that what the writer-director, Neil Jordan (best known for his 1986 Mona Lisa), was trying for was an Irish phantasmagoria—a Midsummer Night's Dream, with love swaps and ghostly transformations. The producers put the film through a series of American previews, then recut it, removing between fifteen and twenty-five per cent of the footage, in the hope, it appears, of making it less complex and less delicate—easier for audiences to understand. All they succeeded in doing was messing up Jordan's film-now it's neither one thing nor the other. It has lovely ephemera, though, and once you're past the first fifteen minutes or so (which are clumsily antic) the moody texture can take hold of your imagination. At its best, the film is a soft Irish kiss. ; H
There may never have been a movie ghost wh owas as sexy and ethereal a love object as Daryl Hannah is here. With her flower-stem neck tilted and her long legs sheathed in a lacy, diaphanous gown, she's the bride who was murdered by her husband (Liam Neeson) on their wedding night and has been doomed to reenact the death scene each night for two centuries. Now one of the Americans (Steve Guttenberg, unfortunately) intercedes. There's paranormal grace in the way Hannah and Neeson pass through stone walls, and when Hannah puts her hands through the wall and over Guttenberg's eyes it's like being teased in a dream. When she makes love to him by passing her body through his, it's perfect poetic sex.
Peter O'Toole is the gentleman souse Peter Plunkett, who's trying to save the labyrinthine Castle Plunkett from foreclosure and keep the villagers in the jobs that are their only means of support; he's busily—and ineptly—staging apparitions for the tourists when the real ghosts, come out of the crumbling walls. (The exteriors were shot at the medieval Dromore Castle, which was once the county seat of the earls of Limerick and is said to have been a model for Ludwig's rococo castle in Bavaria, which, in turn, was a model for the castle at Disneyland.) O'Toole's Plunkett has a comic heartbreaker of a scene when the ghost of his father (played by Ray McAnally) appears and the dissolute son be-' comes plaintive and young-boyish as he chides his daddy for leaving him without warning or preparation. The keening melancholy in O'Toole's voice hovers in the air long after Daddy apologizes. (O'Toole's voice is his spirit.)
a lacy, diaphanous gown, she's the bride who was murdered by her husband (Liam Neeson) on their wedding night and has been doomed to reenact the death scene each night for two centuries. Now one of the Americans (Steve Guttenberg, unfortunately) intercedes. There's paranormal grace in the way Hannah and Neeson pass through stone walls, and when Hannah puts her hands through the wall and over Guttenberg's eyes it's like being teased in a dream. When she makes love to him by passing her body through his, it's perfect poetic sex.
Beverly D'Angelo does some risky comedy as Guttenberg's rich, unsatisfied wife, who stretches her mouth wide yowling at him and then, encountering the ghostly Liam Neeson, melts. D'Angelo doesn't have Daryl Hannah's heaven-kissing height or the sweet irony that Hannah brings to her scenes, but she has her own walloping gorgeousness. She's like a more brass-lunged version of the young Joan Blondell. Batting her big eyes and swinging her hips, D'Angelo knows how to be the tough city girl and yet make you understand this girl's yearnings. The character she's playing is American but she's also Irish; D'Angelo holds the picture together. Jennifer Tilly is nifty as the flirtatious Miranda, who has sworn off men (temporarily), and Peter Gallagher is the doubt-ridden Brother Tony, who is just about to take his final vows; they have a scene together in a revolving bed that spins faster and faster. Liz Smith (of A Private Function) is Plunkett's wonderfully pie-eyed mother; normally it's disturbing when a widow talks of her long-dead husband as if he were still around—here it's natural. Donal McCann (of The Dead) is the skunk-drunk tour guide; Martin Ferrero (of "Miami Vice") is a skeptical parapsychologist; and Mary Coughlan, who plays one of the villagers, sings an Irish song in a low, almost conversational voice—its plainness can get to you. Guttenberg isn't actually bad as an amiable, love-struck ninny; he shows a tender side, and he's blandly silly-funny when he recites lyrics by The Big Bopper. But the role might have more tingle if it were filled by an actor who could suggest that he was shifting from one love to another, and that this meant changing realms.
The picture has special effects by Meddings Magic Camera Company, which are in an altogether different style from the usual ones, by Industrial Light & Magic., They're less industrial and more like storybook illustrations. Sprites with comet tails flit through the air. A white horst speaks in a thick brogue. The nuns who gather accusingly around the tempted Brother have scarily stiff wimples and pinpoint eyes; they're domesticated demons—something you could whip up for Halloween. Stones fly out of a wall as if by command (while O'Toole at his most cadenced expresses stupefaction). And when the tour bus, which has sunk in a misty bog, rises and flies you're not sure for a second or two what's going on. The cinematographer, Alex Thomson, wants you to stare a little. Nothing looks newly processed; the magic here feels like magic—it's dark and cobwebby, and even a little musty. And when an effect doesn't quite work—like the small boy who turns into a cardboard cutout—you're bothered by its not working, because the conception is promising and you wanted to feel the mystery. The tattered High Spirits can't be called a good movie, but I'd call it an inspired one. The repeated reenactments of the two-hundred-year-old murder are spooky, beautiful, and passionate; they're a poet's distillation of the mechanical nature of movies.
