All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly. --- Dawn Powell
Showing posts with label movie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movie. Show all posts

Sunday, February 6, 2022

Movie Monday: Carol


Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett discovered the wonder that is Cincinnati in 2014 as they filmed the 1950s-era love story "Carol" there. The actresses praised Cincinnati during the press build-up for the movie's nationwide release in 2016:   “It’s been phenomenal shooting in Cincinnati, actually,” Blanchett said. “The architecture here is phenomenal. There’s so many buildings that haven’t been ... gentrified. Everyone, the fire department and police, have been so cooperative.”

While the mise-en-scene and acting is beautiful, I was frustrated by Carol's seemingly cruel nature and therefore didn't realise the appeal of the film, especially to someone I love, until I found the following explanation from the author of the original work: 

When Patricia Highsmith allowed her name to be attached to the 1990 republication by Bloomsbury (she previously published such it under the pseudonym Claire Morgan), she wrote in the "Afterword" to the edition:

The appeal of The Price of Salt was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters, or at least they were going to try to have a future together. Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing—alone and miserable and shunned—into a depression equal to hell.

Monday, January 24, 2022

Movie Monday: From Denton, Ohio to the galaxy of Transylvania


The sad news of Meat Loaf's death last week, reminded me that while in Scotland I flipped through my friend John's Xmas gift of Atlas of Imagined Places and was surprised to learn that The Rocky Horror Picture Show was partially set in Ohio.  

The story begins in Denton, Ohio as Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon), after getting engaged, travel to see the man who began it, but wind up at the castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), a transvestite alien from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania.  In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Janet is reading The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland, Ohio newspaper, and the map seen in The Denton Affair (I) is that of southeastern Ohio.