26 September 2006

The Paradine Case & Montenegro & Italian wine and Swiss cheese


Two movies at Cinema Sture:


The Paradine Case by Alfred Hitchcock and with Alida Valli in the leading role.
Her role character is a woman accused of having murdered her husband, an old and rich man.

Gregory Peck plays a young and succesful lawyer (attorney) who takes on her case.
He falls in love with this woman and confronts problems both at home, with his wife, and with people he talks to concerning this mysterious (a role Valli often plays, unfortunately) woman and her background and credibility.

Peck's lawyer tries to put the blame on a servant with whom the woman seems to have had an affair.
He gets jealous at this servant when confronted with him as he accuse Vallis character of being a "evil woman".

Because of Pecks and Vallis ambivalence, Peck doesn't succeed in defending her. She is sentenced to death.


Film n:o 2:
Montenegro ("Montenegro or Pigs and Pearls") by Dusan Makavejev with Erland Josephson in one of the leading roles.
This was Josephson's own choice of film.

During the autumn the Swedish Cinematek is going to show some of the films Josephson has chosen where he also acts.
He should himself have been present but due to health problems, he unfortunately couldn't attend.

This film starts of in a good and absurd way but deteriorates.

Josephsson is travelling a lot in his work and he and his wife and children live in a relatively big house in a fashionable suburb of Stockholm (Lidingö!).

Soon one can see signs of her not feeling psychologically well. Her husband - Josephsson - is going abroad and at a late stage she desides to follow him though he allready is at the airport. She misses the plane, meet a group of people who wants to help her.
They take her to a combined club, drugstore, cabaret where she stays and begins a life of her own far away from the socially well established life she was leading with her husband.
The husband thinks she has been kidnapped.

He starts a life of his own, free from any restrictions that the marriage impose on him.

A psychiatrist - actor Per Oscarsson - becomes his best friend.
The same psychiatrist who Josephsson hired to help his wife. His wife becomes in a way more liberated and so does he.

Otherwise this film was a mishap!


In the evening Aurore and I visited the Italian Cultural Institute (photo above). They arranged with a degustation du vin et du fromage.

Italian and Swiss wines and cheeses. Six wines and six cheeses, three from each country.

When the director talked about the italian wines and cheeses, he happened to say that Italy has the best wines and the best cheeses, ending with the words: "The French have to excuse us"! 
"Buuuuuhhhh" was heard from the audience - Aurore of course!
The director of the Italian Institute looked surprised and said: 
"Oh, I'm sorry, we obviously have a French representative here!"
They asked if there were any other French visitors in the audience and besides Aurore there was one more woman.

However, after having tasted the cheeses and the wines, we could conclude that the Swiss cheeses where the best, two out of six wines were good.




(Photo copyright: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Italienska_kulturinst.jpg/250px-Italienska_kulturinst.jpg)

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