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| Anne (Garai) may be surrounded by people she can no longer trust, but she still looks great. |
Glorious 39, from 2009, is a beautifully filmed piece about an aristocratic family right before the start of Britain's involvement in World War II. Anne's father, Sir Alexander Keyes (Bill Nighy), a member of the House of Commons, is a loving father. But he has friends who visit him with very different political viewpoints, the excitable Member of Parliament Hector (David Tennant), and the sinister Balcombe, (Jeremy Northam).
The film is full of wonderful actors: Julie Christie, Eddie Redmayne, Charlie Cox, Christopher Lee, Corin Redgrave, Jenny Agutter and Hugh Bonneville. There are some strange set pieces, especially one set at a pet crematorium, a bit of a heavy-handed reference to concentration camps. Apparently there was panic at the time that household pets would have to be abandoned if war came to England, so people preemptively had them put down. Yikes.
I didn't care for the opening and closing "present-day" bookend scenes, but Anne's story set in 1939 was definitely interesting and involving. Most movies focus on the good guys and the bad guys. This is a movie about people who didn't want war, but weren't protesting peace, either. They were actively trying to bargain with Hitler. I wish there had been some follow-up with the characters, however. What happens to someone who didn't support the war once war finally came and all "negotiations" were off? Glorious 39 tries to be too many things — a period piece, a message picture, a Hitchcockian thriller. It isn't necessarily completely successful, but it's interesting. And Romola Garai is beautiful and vulnerable, especially in a scene towards the end of the film, in a red dress.
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| Hey lady ... |
is about a British mission to sneak into Berlin and steal the Enigma, a machine used by the Germans to send coded messages. A team is recruited by the pompous Col. Aiken (Edward Fox) to parachute near to Berlin and infiltrate the factory where the Enigma devices are produced. The brilliant strategy to prevent their detection is for the men to be in drag — the factory workers are all women.The ragtag team includes Matt Le Blanc as an American secret agent whose missions never quite come out all right, Eddie Izzard as an officer and drag queen who will train the guys how to walk and look like women, James Cosmo as the dim but good-hearted sergeant Archie, and David Birkin as multi-lingual whiz-kid Johnno.
They are truly a bunch of misfits and are lucky to have a German co-conspirator in Romy (Nicolette Krebitz), who both provides a love interest for Le Blanc and saves their butts on numerous occasions. It's silly and old-fashioned, but also sweet and surprisingly touching, showing how the Germans, especially children, suffered as their city was blown to bits. And Izzard is wonderful and looks fabulous entertaining the German troops.
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| Peter (Firth) and Don (Baldwin) bond over whisky |
, from 2000 and based on a play by Noel Coward, is set in 1950s England. The Countess of Marshwood (Julie Andrews) learns that her son the Earl is bringing home his fiancée, a Hollywood star, Miranda Frayle (Jean Tripplehorn).Being Coward, it also turns out that Miranda is actually the sister of Moxie (Sophie Thompson), the Countess's beloved maid, and the sisters are not on good terms. Colin Firth plays an amused and trouble-making cousin, Peter Ingleton, who is both starstruck and enjoying the further complication in the person of Miranda's visiting ex-lover and co-star, Don Lucas (Billy Baldwin). As if that isn't enough to recommend this comedy of manners, Stephen Fry plays the family butler Crestwell.
Hooray for little movies — and the DVRs, etc. that enable us to catch them from time to time.
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