The World of Henry Orient

Because if it is then it'll be like that parody of sixties movies when Leslie Nielsen guest starred on SNL in the late eighties.

"I must remind you, I am a square."

"WE DIDN'T REALLY MEAN TO BLOW YOUR MIND."

xpost -- We're saved!

I warn you though, Peter Sellers is in EXTREME Peter Sellers mode here.

doesn't thora birch have a poster of it in ghost world?

Also: S/D Angela Lansbury roles

Samson & Delilah!

She sure does.

I hadn't seen World Of Henry Orient in years, and I'd forgotten how great it was. The entire cast just underplays enough to avoid ridiculousness - the two girls aren't too giggly or precocious. Sellers is still in full-on Sellers mode but minus much of the slapstick that makes the Pink Panther movies tiresome. Lots of middle class/upper class collisions, but handled with wit and intelligence.

Fave scene: a rattled Sellers is playing to a bored audience that doesn't understand "that avant garde stuff" and keeps crescendoing in the wrong key - garnering dirty looks from the conductor who finally whispers "B flat" at him.

Autumn/winter in 1964 NYC steals the show though.

Oh man oh man oh man. All the location shots make me wanna cry.

I watched about half of this, and half to watch the rest.

I am sort of fascinated by the girl on the bus with the stringy hair and weird accent.

The Elmer Bernstein score is excellent.

An LA friend worked on this film and has known Angela Lansbury ever since.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Paulaprentissportrait.jpg

I think I saw this once on TV when I was teenager, so this was essentially the first time.

Autumn/winter in 1964 NYC steals the show though.

Will be the second person to second this--those shots are beautiful. And the sequence early on where they played around with slow-motion, you can see the influence of Truffaut. In general it felt like one of those mid-'60s American films where you sense there's an attempt to break out towards something new.

such a lovely movie :-)

Life after the movie for the two lead actresses (including what you don't want to hear, involvement between Tippy Walker, then 16, and director George Roy Hill). Jennifer on My Mind is still on YouTube, though now chopped into six parts.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-star-is-born-lost-and-found

jesus

' mostly platonic' is an excellent use of the word 'platonic ...

(funny i remember reading this article pre-Metoo times-zeitgeist and I only remembered the Republican part)

I took "mostly platonic" to be a euphemism for "sometimes not platonic."

this is her original post

There is also the tale of my relationship with George Roy Hill following me which I never realized until much later. We fell in love during the filming of the World of Henry Orient and remained so through most of my senior year in high school[actually, the story goes, he had lunch with me every day starting during the rehearsal period to win my trust and calm me down and gradually gradully we developed a strong bond. he was one of the only adults that sanctioned my personhood ever, my family was so competitive and I was the daughter. We stared filming in June, I got more and more used to the camera as time went by, never comfortable, never really confident, but had begun to be able to think abit after the terrifying ACTION. So, it was August, I was in his office, a basement cement block room reaking of lysol, the whole place reaked of lysol except the soundstages which reaked of aerosol--movie making wasn't the healthiest environment, having the framiliar lunch, suddenly he jumped up, I can't remember what we were talking about whether there was some sort of creciendo or if it was apropos of nothing, and came over to me saying he was going to teach me how to french kiss, and started to kiss me in this most passionate way-agressive-serious sloppy way. I know I had a second to react, a world of thought rushed through my mind, a jam of screams and curiosity, resistance, fear. How could I refuse him? the director, he had become the only person in the world I depended on for validation, he made my performance in the film possible, how could I turn him away? Risk the loss of his support, admiration? I was 16, and not the worldly 16 that is so often depicted now or then. I had never had a boyfriend, was so shy I could hardly speak to the soft spoken ladies in the library. I was sophisticated in asthetic ways only, I could write and draw, I knew what great music was, I could stand up when I needed to to defend another's life, but my own was always sacrificed. It happened, he Kissed me, and that line was crossed. To this day I wish he hadn't or that I had been able to be firm in a self protective way, but I didn't know how. On the other hand, these things happen at some point. That it was him for me was so intensely romantic and profound. I loved him, he loved me, I believe. It had no future. There was no marriage there. I would never want to ruin his family. The secrecy nearly killed me, and the controversy. No turning back, very tough to go forward. Mr. Hill was such the combination of tough strict upperclass values-Yale, the opera. tweed jackets, wellborn manners- and giddy childish rebellion- go for it in your face audacious rebellion( and I believe it was this dichotomy that killed him). It was 1963, those terrible perverse clamps of puritan and victorian sensibilties were lifting. It happened. It Happened. It happened. I have a really hard time accepting alot of my life, whine and run away and freak out, but I shouldn't. It happened and we didn't let it destroy anything or one else, maybe alittle ourselves. That too is another aside. He came up to see me at school, I can't remember if it was Spring of junior year or Fall of senior. We were hanging out in between two sections of the back of the big school building at Dobbs, asphalt, big high brick building walls. I was treading a raised stretch of blacktop, that little low devider for marking parking spaces, and he was watching me in his long dark blue soft camel hair coat. I did that kind of thing alot, maybe as a metaphor for higher ground and structure. Then I, without any forethought, or at least at that moment, turned to him and said, "We shouldn't be doing this." He just looked at me, nodded almost imperceptively, and we parted without much distress, maybe not even immediately. He wrote me one letter blaming my mother. It was me, but I never told him that, actually I could never figure out where it came outof. Couldn't shoulder the blame myself, so left it off. We always had the remains of the love we felt for each other, always.] It was very innocent, very real, very profound and very impossible. I was a very young sixteen and he was forty and married to a great woman with 4 brilliant kids, so it had no future but was one of those romantic hybreds, a poetic anomally, beautiful and doomed. There wasn't really much in the way of a physical relationship as I wasn't so into that, being so immature. He cautioned me not to tell anyone which I didn't except for my school friends. He, however, I discovered later, told many of his Hollywood friends. Many people in the industry knew. Johnny Carson wouldn't let me on his show- though that may have been because he didn't like to get caught with the shy types, especially kids; but I thought it was because of the gossip. It was sad. I thought we were very discrete. I was at school, he was in New York, how could we see each other? We spoke on the phone alot, he wrote me long fabulous eloquent letters. Sometimes we saw each other when I could get away during vacations or took trips to NYC to museums with my classmates and such. It feels wrong to be writing about it even now. He took me to the the Gugenheim, to my first Charlie Chaplin movies, took me to see Elvira Madigan, after which I couldn't speak for a good 15 minutes, he watched anxiously. He was so smart and funny and interested in me, for the first time in my life an adult wanted to know what I thought about things, watched me for reactions. I guess everyone's first love feels like that, but Mr. Hill was such the accomplished man. My family was cultured, too, so it wasn't as though he was so alien, but he was so intense and experienced in a worldly way, had been through the war and done so much in theater, tv and movies, which he would share with me(especailly during our first lunches). Had lived in Dublin with the prototype of The Gingerman, Gaynor Crist, wrote to me about him when the book came out, funny I never read it. Finally though, it didn't feel right, couldn't go on, so we let it die...there is more to it than that. So he too became unapproachable and many of his cohorts held me in disrepute, as did many others who just knew the barest glimpses of our relationship. Liza Minelli, I remember, glaring at me from a cross a diningroom, glared at me for years, which I attribute to that piece of gossip, though not sure what she was working on. It wasn't taudry in reality but has become I think one of the little nasty tidbits of the "insiders". It was one of the huge events of my life. And because of the enormous secrecy, having to keep it from my parents, the effect it had on me as a person, my connection to the world was torn apart and I couldn't tell any adult why I was so changed, so rocked, so disaffected suddenly. It was very destabilizing. And at the very beginning of my "career". I was young, alone, sensitive and inexperienced, add insecure and you have a good recipe for disaster