"GLITTERING PRIZES" vs. "LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE"

The first paragraph of a review of Lucinella by Kati Nolfi for the “Book Slut” blog.

“Artists are cherished and reviled for their bad behavior. They transgress where normal people cannot. In Lore Segal's Lucinella, a thrilling experimental novella first published in 1976 and now reissued by Melville House's Contemporary Art of the Novella series, New York poets are a competitive and shallow bunch. The bad behavior in Lucinella is the social kind; while there's some indiscriminate fucking, there's no homicide or drug addiction. The poets are preoccupied with who's who, who's where, what they're writing, who they're doing. They are writers, but they are not self-sacrificing ascetics as some assume artists must be. They would sacrifice each other for a speaking engagement or publication; an editor's career is described as "standing on your writers' shoulders, alternatively with your foot on one or another of their necks." You could call the relationships symbiotic or more accurately, opportunistic. They search for meaning, order, fame, and transcendence in dowdyish party scenes of empty fabulousness and joyless desperation. But then each success proves insignificant and fuels the search for the next one.“

This is a pretty apt summary of “The Glittering Prizes.” Now I’ve watched Nancy Mitford’s “Love in a Cold Climate” or rather the BBC version by Debora Moggash. The two series make an interesting comparison because both are fictionalized autobiography, they are about post-war periods after WWI (“Love in. . .” filmed in 2002) and after WWII (“Glittering Prize” filmed in 1975) but the actual films were made in reverse order. “Love in” follows the progress of related women (the famous Mitford sisters) and “Glittering Prize” follows a small group of Cambridge students (Raphael’s cohort), who are at first considered the very epitome of the best and by the end mocked as stuck and old-fashioned. (I’d say the end was a lot more convincing than the beginning.) Both are about ways of life that are pretty much gone now: the over-educated brilliant young genius (most of the plot rests on the shoulders of Tom Conti who plays a Jewish semi-intruder -- more Dustin Hoffman than Al Pacino) in an abrasive and competitive world. "Love in .." is about the uneducated but high-spirited young women of the landed gentry gone goofy by inbreeding or something, who somehow seem destined to shine without awards.

I cannot conceal that I enjoyed “Love in a Cold Climate” far more than “Glittering Prizes.” There are some obvious reasons, like the fact that “Love in. . .” is about women. Some people would mind that the young ones are slender and bright with bouncing pointy breasts (Didn’t people wear bras in those days?) but I don’t. It was easy to identify with their energy. The eccentrics in “Love in. . .” are played masterfully by terrifically talented and experienced English actors. The “Glittering” actors are very young, though they would later become stalwarts.

Maybe some of my dislike of “Glittering” comes from knowing the types all too well. Didn’t the NU geniuses start out very much this way? The U of C geniuses were like this, at least the ones I knew, which were the least brilliant since the truly brilliant ones were hard at work somewhere, the source of their genius. But the daughters of the landed gentry are far enough in the past to romanticize, even if these girls are not quite far enough back to be Jane Austen heroines or even the cynical women of Edith Wharton. Think “The House of Eliot.” It does help to introduce the Paris factor, where men escape the deadly English love of drafty castles and bird hunting. The impossible and goofy father in this version (Alan Bates) is more lovable than most, since his violence after WWI is mostly a matter of writing an enemy’s name on a piece of paper and putting it in a deadly drawer, which he believes will kill them within the year.

The biggest difficulty with “Glittering” took me a while to figure out. Even though Frederic Raphael had considerable experience with movies, this series is done with stage technique. Raphael writes quips suitable for throwing to the far reaches of the auditorium. The actors are stage actors who react broadly, hold for laughs, and even mug as though they were dozens of feet away. And most of all, the camera works like a Fifties television camera with very little editing, none of it particularly artful though there are clever angles over the tops of furniture or around corners. Everything moves way too slowly. And the furniture, etc., is not from a particularly fortunate period IMHO. The women are simply inexplicable: they don’t seem capable of transparency or even manageability, simply taking abrupt turns without much warning except that the patterns are predictable. (“Wife becomes bored and turns to a career.” “Career woman abandons all for family.”) The whole thing seems to be mapped more than motivated.

So my premise is that this movie series, even though it was written by an Oscar winner (which sits glittering in the background of one episode) is actually clinging to a past medium and that makes it deadly. It is an auto that acts like a buggy. When I went to imdb.com to see if others remarked on it, I found something quite funnily transparent. There were comments, very similar, all saying how wonderful and topnotch everything was, and begging/commanding that such a treasure be released on DVD at once. Clearly, the troupe had united their fans, friends and probably family in a successful effort to get this series “out there.” But it was a case of “be awful careful what you wish for, because you might get it.” It might have been better to have just remembered how brilliant it was.

Since the Mitford story is easier to grasp and, to be honest, much funnier since the fun doesn’t depend on smart talk but rather on essentially impossible situations, it survives the passage of time. But also, the editing is brisk, the sets cannot be topped (the great houses of England and a few excellent places in Paris) and the characters look out at the world as much as they look inward.