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ECLIPSE SERIES 20: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON FILM

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Major Barbara

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Wendy Hiller plays one of George Bernard Shaw’s most memorable, controversial characters, Barbara Underschaft, a Salvation Army officer who speaks out against the hypocrisy she believes exists in her Christian charity organization.

Caesar and Cleopatra

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Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains pop off the screen in vivid Technicolor in Gabriel Pascal’s adaptation of Shaw’s 1901 play about love and politics in ancient Rome and Egypt.

Androcles and the Lion

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George Bernard Shaw’s breezy, delightful dramatization of the classic fable—about a Christian captive saved from death at the Colosseum because of his kind act of pulling a thorn from a lion’s paw—was written as a meditation on modern Christian values.

Two of these are (or have been) available on DVD in the UK for a while. I suspect that we won't seen much improvement over the prior versions. In any event, both films are enjoyable in terms of script and performances -- if not exactly cinematic masterworks. I think I saw the Androcles -- a zillion or so years ago.

Completely out of the blue, unless I missed something. Looks interesting at least, though I never heard of the directors. But Vivien Leigh, Wendy Hiller, Claude Rains make this surely worth a look.

Pygmalion absent?!...

BTW I think Shaw was the only man to win a Nobel Prize and an Oscar before Al Gore...

ellipsis7 wrote:Pygmalion absent?!...

it would have been nice if they had put Pygmalion in this Eclipse set rather than pulling it out of print in the main line and releasing it as an Essential Art House DVD, but Criterion usually takes pains to make sure that customers don't have to buy a release twice. Imagine if they had included it in the Eclipse set how many people would posting in this thread, "But I already own Pygmalion! Criterion sucks for making me buy it again if I get this set."

ellipsis7 wrote:BTW I think Shaw was the only man to win a Nobel Prize and an Oscar before Al Gore...

Al Gore did not win an Oscar, but I know what you mean.

Swings and roundabouts I suppose...

BTW made a dramatic film in GBS's house 'Shaw's Corner', used lot's of real props including that Oscar statue...

This is a pleasant surprise, although I would have wished it was later than now. Writer-themed set was a good idea.

Eclipse is getting more and more interesting than the main line

Al Gore did win a Best Documentary Oscar, right?

Mark Metcalf wrote:Al Gore did win a Best Documentary Oscar, right?

No. Davis Guggenheim won the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, as the award in the Documentary category goes to the winning film's director. I think so many people are confused about this because they saw Al Gore on stage with Guggenheim when the Oscar was presented.

Sorry to keep taking this thread off topic. Back to discussion of George Bernard Shaw . . .

It's too bad they couldn't rescue Saint Joan from its inevitable future in Warners Archive Hell by including it here

Gabriel Pascal, Shaw's favoured movie man, directed & produced CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA & MAJOR BARBARA, and produced ANDROCLES AND THE LION (and indeed PYGMALION)... So this is actually a Shaw/Pascal set...

Shaw apparently did LOTS of kibbitzing on Major Barbara -- not quite a co-director but he was highly involved. Most of the filming of Caesar and Cleopatra took place out of Shaw's reach (and he was older and less active) -- but Shaw was very worried about Pascal's extravagance (and going way over the budget). He (correctly, as it turned out) felt that this was going to kill the chance (in HIS lifetime) of any first-rate adaptations of the works he most wanted to see adapted (such as Saint Joan, which was one of his most cherished projects).

cdnchris wrote:DVD review

Do these have English SDH subtitles?

triodelover wrote:

cdnchris wrote:DVD review

Do these have English SDH subtitles?

Yes they all have.

Thank you.

Late to the game but I suspect the Bluray of Tooth Fairy got in the way.
Beaver

The comment about Ashley Judd in the Tooth Fairy review makes it sound like it was written for Us magazine

Minkin wrote:Late to the game but I suspect the Bluray of Tooth Fairy got in the way.
Beaver

See my comment at the end of the Costa thread.

Cracked into the set with Major Barbara and while I enjoyed where the film took me, I must admit that I felt for most of the running time like I was one step behind everything on the screen. I got the gist of it, but a lot of the character motivations and plot mechanations were and remain a mystery for me. The angle of the father, for instance, is still fuzzy for me-- In retrospect I "get" what he literally does, but the film doesn't seem to bother. How seriously are we the audience to take the Rex Harrison character (throughout the film)? Why is so much time spent on dull relations who have no ultimate relation (thank you) to the plot, and so little on the titular character herself? The best stretch of the film involved Hiller's handling of the abusive brawler, but what of that odd reunion at the end? I like being befuddled on occasion, but I can't decide whether these are justified ellipses and lapses in the service of an artistic end, or just sloppy filmmaking

Are you familiar with anything else by Shaw?

Yes, of course. I'm not sure I like where this is going...

Just wondering if your objection might be to the underlying Shaw foundation itself -- or just the film treatment in this particular film. ;~}