"a-place-in-the-sun"

Great drama, like life, turns on choices. Good choices usually involve a fair amount of luck. Bad choices tend to roll downhill into a ravine of consequences that can’t be seen from above. Without a very bad decision made by someone, many movies simply would not have a narrative engine.

 With warmer weather comes thoughts of romance. Or is it just me? Even with forced isolation causing the occasional disagreement, I feel profoundly grateful to have my wife of three-plus decades experiencing this strange, new CO-VID world with me.

You may remember her as Rosanne Barr’s Granny on TV. Or perhaps the rotund former swimming champion who dives in on cue in 1972’s delightfully cheesy “The Poseidon Adventure.” 

By the age of thirty, Montgomery Clift seemed to have everything: youth, beauty, talent, and the prospect of a lucrative film career with limitless possibilities. Along with his friend and colleague Marlon Brando, Clift was the most visible and gifted of a new generation of movie star who’d been trained in “the Method” at Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. The Studio’s fundamental goal was to help actors inhabit their characters more fully in order to achieve greater realism and intensity in their performances.

Forbidden love, more common in human experience than one might think, is torturous, unusually passionate, and freighted with risk. The heightened drama — or melodrama — it generates makes it a natural and desirable ingredient for film.

Though the western has always been a durable (and distinctly American) genre, only six western titles appear on the American Film institute’s list of top 100 films. One of them is a personal favorite, 1953’s “Shane.”

Those who remember her only from those endless grocery store checkout line-stories on her health problems, fluctuating weight, friendship with Michael Jackson & Bubbles, or impressive eight marriages (she wed Richard Burton twice), pay attention. Today, we celebrate the film career of a legendary beauty, prodigious talent, and a big personality, Elizabeth Taylor.