AMC is playing right now An Unmarried Woman, a movie that drove me crazy when I first saw it in a cinema in the late 1970s and still drives me crazy today.
Granted, I’ve been a fan of Alan Bates ever since I first saw him naked in Women In Love, back when I was young and impressionable. Here he is in Women In Love talking about figs:
In An Unmarried Woman Alan Bates (who in real life was the most beautiful man on earth – trust me on this) played the sexiest most tender man on earth and he was madly in love with Erica. Lucky Erica, would you say? But the premise of An Unmarried Woman is that Erica’s going to be independent no matter what, so she drops him.
Idiot.
Give Erica 5 long years of independence, bad dates, and living with too many cats and she’d have had time to regret her stupid decision. By which time he would have found someone who appreciated him for who he was.
Or as Judy Benjamin put it,
“Did you happen to see that movie An Unmarried Woman?
Well, I didn’t get it… I mean, I would’ve been Mrs. Alan Bates so fast that guy wouldn’t have known what hit him!”
Anyway, Dr. Sanity has the Carnival,
I fell in love with Alan Bates when I was a little girl, while watching “Whistle Down The Wind,” which I thought would be a typical Hayley Mills flick but which. . . wasn’t. A few years later, I fell in love with him again in “Georgy Girl,” and to this day I like the song. Therefore, when I saw “An Unmarried Woman” for the first time many years ago, all I could think was, “A Very Very Stupid Woman,” and I still think so. And I don’t even LIKE figs. . . .
There’s figs, and then there’s AB talking about figs.
Women in Love is definitely graduate material at Jeremayakovka’s “Charm School”. For the freshman cirriculum, I’d be sure to assign The King of Hearts.
Ah, another wonderful AB performance.
Did you see him in An Englishman Abroad?
Sorry, no. Never heard of it. I noticed that he turns a cruel husband opposite Isabelle Adjani in Quartet.
In favor of Oliver Reed, I must put in a good word about Ken Russell’s Devils.
Of course he was always excellent no matter how good/bad the movie, but An Englishman Abroad was a lot different from his romantic parts when he was young. I’ll have to watch Quartet again. I also really enjoyed AB and a young Gary Oldman in We Think the World of You.
The Devils was Some Movie, wasn’t it! Oliver Reed was magnificent.
Ken Russell had also directed him in a b&w made for TV movie on Dante Gabriel Rossetti playing the title part. I don’t know if it’s available any more but it’s a must-see for all OR fans.
That’s one of those yell at the screen movies…Dumb girl! You had paradise at your feet and you blew it!
I always though they BOTH, AB & OR were exceptionally dishy.