Three movies

"Myrtle, you have a lot to learn and I hope you never learn it"--HARVEY

Last night I saw HARVEY at the Yonge & Dundas Event Screen (for the second time). That's the one with James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, a good-natured tippler who keeps seeing a six-foot rabbit called Harvey.  An enjoyable farce with Stewart in rare form.

Today I saw the start of Peter Watkins' THE FREETHINKER, a documentary-style biography of Swedish playwright August Strindberg.  It was three or four hours long, but I only saw a little of it:  it was all over the place and hard to follow. (Watkins did better with his more straightforward film about the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.)

This evening I saw Dudley Nichols' movie of Eugene O'Neill's MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, a curious, powerful reworking of the Electra story. (That's the Greek legend where Agamemnon came back from the Trojan War only to be murdered by his wife and her lover, and his daughter Electra pressured her brother Orestes to avenge their father:  psychologists speak of the Electra complex as a female version of the Oedipus complex.) This version has Rosalind Russell as the Electra figure, moving the story to after the Civil War.  Lots of incestuous subtext and brooding over family ghosts.