A RARE WINDOW TO THE FILMS OF HITCH & CAPRA
You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down….I’ll give you the moon, Mary!” declares a young, dashing James Stewart on a deserted street in the film, It’s A Wonderful Life. “I’ll take it. Then what?” asks an entranced Mary, played by Donna Reed.
“You can swallow it, and it’ll all dissolve see, and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair... am I talking too much?”
Few actors could have pulled off this sort of bumbling romance with such charm. There was an endearing sincerity about Stewart that allowed him to single-handedly carry this Christmas classic by Frank Capra. But he also had an edgy side – he could just as easily play the debonair gentleman, troubled detective, prying neighbour or unsuspecting yet brainy professor. A slice of Stewart’s versatility will be on display at a two-day film festival this weekend. He stars in three of the four films being screened.
That, says festival director Dinesh Singh, was “just a coincidence.” Singh is the founder of Navrasa Duende, a Delhibased arts and entertainment company that is hosting the festival.
Singh, who picked the films, says he chose Italian-American director Capra and Alfred Hitchcock because both started out making silent movies and then graduated to sound films. But that’s where the similarity between the two ends. While Capra made memorable screwball comedies, characterised by a humorous battle between the sexes, Hitchcock catapulted to fame for his psychological dramas.
The movies couldn’t be more different. It’s a Wonderful Life is a life-affirming tale; and It Happened One Night is a romantic comedy starring Clark Gable as a down-on his-luck reporter and Claudette Colbert as a pampered heiress. In Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Stewart and his wife, Josephine, played by singer Doris Day, are embroiled in a mystery when their son is kidnapped while on a holiday in Morocco. On a side note: Day’s famous song, Que Sera Sera, is in this film. Vertigo, also by Hitchcock, is a dark thriller featuring Stewart as a tormented detective.
Stewart was 38 when he played the jolly do-gooder in It’s A Wonderful Life. Ten years later, in The Man Who Knew Too Much, he is a worldly, unyielding doctor determined to save his son. By Vertigo, his final film with Hitchcock, he is 50 and a man haunted by his past. Vertigo, Singh says, is his favourite because it’s experimental “even by today’s standards. “I’d call it a biopic” he says. “It reflects the shades of Hitchcock.”
What: The World’s Best Classic Movie Festival When: May 27-28, 4:30 pm, 7.30 pm Where: Siri Fort Auditorium. Entry free. Nearest metro station: Green Park RSVP ndmovies@navrasaduende.com for an invite