this film caught me. i dont know why but it mesmerised me. must i say britain has went to the dogs since trht time
I know next to nothing about Britain but I just watched this film, too, and it was mesmerizing. Nothing much but life goes on but the Gibbons family and friends are all compelling creatures spouting those wonderful N. Coward words. David Lean sure knew how to tell a story on film.
shareI agree with you and I am English.
Better ethics and morality.
Don't forget it's a somewhat idealised, rosy view of English family life. Nowadays film makers go out of their way to show the bad side of life at the expense of the good, but in those days it was the other way around. But I agree that general standards of behaviour in Britain have declined since those times.
share<But I agree that general standards of behaviour in Britain have declined since those times.>
Standards of behavior has declined everywhere.
This is a compellingly well-written, cast, and acted full-color (refreshingly different from the standard black & white photography of the period) look at life in the household of one ordinary, middle-class "suburban" English family between the end of World War I in 1918 and the beginning of World War II in 1939.
I've found myself thinking some of the very thoughts that some of the characters express in this film ("I wonder what kind of people will live in this house when we've gone..."). The ebb and flow and vagaries of day-to-day life and living over the years, the interactions between the family members (nuclear and extended) and their close neighbors and friends, their highs and lows, their attitudes and attributes, triumphs and tragedies, are well represented.
An interesting film, definitely worth watching.
I agree - I call it the coarsening of society - we can thank all the yahoos who go for gross or outrageous behavior to become famous and make money for a lot of it. The more children are exposed to it the more they think that's the way to behave. Try riding on a city bus filled with teenagers coming home from school - you'll have your ears scorched with the language they use. Disgusting.
shareAll of the companies seen in the film are real (fyi) and my parents reminisced throughout.
Great film.
Please watch my shorthttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt1424542/, click trailer (its the film!)
It's delightfully cosy, that's the perfect word for it!
sharethe coziness comes from the general respect with which the characters held each other. If you think about it, holding each other that way creates the coziest feeling.
shareFirst saw this in the mid seventies as a boy on a Sunday evening. More often than not I was sent to bed halfway through the Sunday night films, but my Mum and Dad let me watch this through. It was such a lovely film, I've seen it about eight times since.
shareSorry, it's a nice cosy film by a master filmaker with some terrific performances by the actors, but any nostalgia for being in England in the time frame of this movie (1918-1939) is just that, rosy-eyed nostalgia. I'm not English, but I've been there 7 times and have studied its history extensively, the lives of the average person not living in the upper classes and nobility could be flat-out horrible during that period. I'd gladly take chavs being snotty to me in a store or hearing swear words on TV over what these people had to endure on a daily basis.
WWI was the beginning of the end of the Empire, it devastated a whole generation of men. A friend from England talks of his grandmother having to marry a much older man than her age because all her male peers were slaughtered in France and Belgium. The lower classes lived in ghastly poverty in what we would now call slums or ghettos and after the start of the Great Depression, even the middle-classes weren't safe. Women didn't get the full right to vote in England until 1928, their lives no matter the class were heavily circumscribed. They were almost completely dependent on finding "the right man" to take care of them after they left their parents house and woe unto those who got knocked up outside of marriage. The class system was brutal and crushing, it slotted people in to rigid roles that had little mobility unless you had piles of cash.
Oh, and there wasn't anything like penicillin or antibiotics, so you could be dead in days if you got the flu, polio was common. Nice! After the time frame of this movie was even worse, WWII was devastating to England, it took until at least the early 60's for it to recover.
I just laugh at people who think they'd rather live in the time period of this movie because of how "uncivilized" everything is now, they probably wouldn't last a week back in 1922.