jacobs-greenwood Directed by Tay Garnett, the screenplay for this Louis Bromfield novel was written by Robert Thoeren and Polly James to create a romance which plays out over 65 years, mostly in flashback. The drama itself is average, but some of the acting is exceptional including Greer Garson in the title role and Agnes Moorehead as Aspasia Conti; both performances were Oscar nominated. Although there are several other familiar actors and actresses in supporting roles, the film's story revolves around Major August 'Gus' Parkington (Walter Pidgeon) and the simple boarding house maid, girl, he married.The Major's a bit of a scoundrel, certainly an independent and a risk taker, the kind of man who helped build this great country, who is somewhat tamed by Susie, whom he dubs his 'Sparrow', as their relationship evolves. Garson, whose character is an 84 year old widow dealing with the problems of her children, their spouses, and her grandchildren when the film opens, is the only actress who appears throughout the story, though Moorehead and Pidgeon play a close second. Edward Arnold, Gladys Cooper, Frances Rafferty, Tom Drake, Dan Duryea, and Lee Patrick (among others) are Parkington family members who appear in the present day (Christmas, 1938) scenes as does Selena Royale, who also appears in some "earlier" scenes as Mrs. Parkington's longtime maid. Cecil Kellaway, Peter Lawford (though he is just window dressing), Tala Birell, Hugh Marlowe and Fortunio Bonanova, as a hired tenor with Hans Conreid as his manager, appear (among others) in discrete flashback scenes.The present day drama is two fold, granddaughter Jane (Rafferty) wants to marry Ned Talbot (Drake) who knows about her father Amory's (Arnold) embezzlement and pending exposure for such, and serves only to provide Mrs. Parkington with opportunities to privately reminisce about her life with her husband. With the exception of the risk taking Amory, the other Parkington heirs have grown fat and lazy living off of the departed Major's largess - this is epitomized by (the typecast?) Duryea, who plays Arnold's son. Cooper, Patrick and the rest of the family (which also includes Helen Freeman as Arnold's wife and Rod Cameron as Patrick's fourth husband) are given little to do besides feign outrage and fill scenes. Byron Foulger appears (uncredited) as a befuddled genealogist. This part of the story is of little interest, providing only clichés. The love story, a triangle of sorts, provides the film its only compelling moments:The Major owned a mine in some drink water town, named Leaping Rock, out West (in 1873 or thereabouts). His only concern was how fast he could the silver out of it, so he paid the workers (Harry Cording etc.) double so that they'd work it instead of worry about their safety. Susie did the cleaning in the local boarding house, which her mother (Mary Servoss) owned. She's naturally excited to meet the worldly Major when he comes to town to check on his investment; he is smitten with her beauty. However, she will not give in to his charms and become another of his conquests. When the mine inevitably collapses, Susie's mother is killed because she was filling in for her daughter, taking lunch to the men. The Major leaves her no choice but to accept his proposal and the next thing you know they're married, living and staying in the Royal Hotel in New York. But, what do you know, the Major had been practically engaged to a French Baroness, also living in New York, named Aspasia Conti (Moorehead), before he'd gone out to Leaping Rock. So, the first thing he does upon his return, after apologizing to Aspasia, is ask her to help Susie become presentable to all his friends in New York! The Major's new wife is not initially (ever?) accepted, which in a perverse way leads to a miscarriage of their first child followed by the Major's revenge upon those to whom he assigns blame. Evidently, the Major is so much smarter than all the other men on Wall Street that he's able to cause bankruptcies and suicides among his rivals at will. Marlowe, playing a lawyer, and Alma Kruger (uncredited), as one of the wronged's wives, appear briefly as persons who educates Susie about her husband's dealings.Susie's and Aspasia's relationship grows as does Susie's with the Major, though she appears to have the upper hand as she's able to wait him out through various disagreements until he breaks down and/or gives in to her (my wife must have seen this movie before we were married). The couple loses another of their children which causes a separation; he goes to England while she cries for a year. Aspasia alludes to the Major's relationship with a certain household hostess he'd hired, which causes Susie to breakout of her funk and travel abroad. There, she meets her "competition" in Birell's character after she'd mistaken Edward (Kellaway), the Prince of Wales, for a gatecrasher. Edward helps Susie to manipulate the situation in her favor once again. Lawford plays a Lord with no lines.The film's best dialogue, spoken between Garson's and Birell's characters, is a rather catty one. The movie ends by wrapping up the present day situation, or not.

lasttimeisaw Tay Garnett's resplendent black-and-white MS. PARKINGTON represents one of eight Garson-Pidgeon star-vehicles, it is a vintage family saga of our titular heroine Susie Parkington (Garson), a rich matron starts with a humble beginning as a chambermaid, when a mine explosion takes her mother's life away, out of guilt and admiration, Major Augustus Tarkington (Pidgeon) marries her and spirits her away to New York, so she can get a luxurious life a woman can ever dream of. She gets some advice to adopt the lifestyle of beau monde from a French aristocrat Baroness Aspasia Conti (Moorehead), who is also Major's confidant. And a new but tumultuous page of life opens and Susie gives her best shot to manage a perfect marriage with a dignitary and grows up to be an exemplar who knows and accomplishes a woman's true worth, heightened by a dramatic presentation of an inopportune situation when most of their dinner guests are in absentia for their fancy reception and bookended by a vignette in London involves Edward, Prince of Wales (Kellaway). These mentioned above actually are told through flashbacks by Susie, when she is an octogenarian and Augustus has long gone, during a Christmas gathering, she learns that her favourite great granddaughter Jane (Rafferty) decides to elope with a former employee of her father Amory (Arnold), and later finds out Amory is going to prison for fraud if he cannot pay a loan worth $31 million, which is equivalent to the entire inheritance for her offspring. It is drastically ironic that her progeny are abominable snobs (save Jane), since Susie is an excellent woman in all respects, but still, bad parenting cannot be dodged, through Gladys Cooper's portrait of her daughter Alice, a sheer ne'er-do-well and pain-in-the-neck. Or could it be a telling proof that the second/third-generation rich are really past hopes for integrity and humility? Since the film bifurcates into two alternate narratives with a time-span of over 60 years, it presents Garson a full-scale chance to act from adolescence to senility, although she is consistently pleasant to watch and impressively dignified in the latter period, her rigid posture can never pass off as a woman in her eighties no matter how much effort exerted from the make-up division. Yet, audience can easily side with her character because of what she represents - a wife with a perfect sense of propriety and a woman with sublime wisdom. As the film's title infers, co-star Pidgeon dutifully retreats to a second tier and downplays Major's volatility and vainglory.Garson is nominated with an Oscar and so is Ms. Moorehead, probably in her most opulent attire, her Aspasia is even much more laudable in handling the delicate issues of the rivalry among women or in a more literal sentence, how to co-exist with the wife of the man you love without hating each other's guts. Kellaway, Arnold and Birell (who plays Lady Nora Ebbsworth, a good sport in playing hostess) are all fittingly memorable, Garnett, a steady hand in orchestrating a character-driven centerpiece with grandeur and style, and so is Bronislau Kaper's mellow escorting score for a two-hour chronicle in the bygone era.

atlasmb This B&W film from 1944 stars Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, who were riding a wave of success together at the time. MGM threw all of their best production and talent at this film and it shows on screen. The sets are fantastic, the cinematography is beautiful, the music is lush. But I felt disappointed with the final product.The story starts during the Christmas holiday in 1938. The members of the Parkington family are assembling in the grand house of their mater familia, Susie (Garson). As they wait for Susie to descend the stair and honor them with her presence, they spread their flawed character traits (and dissatisfaction with the world) around the drawing room.You may have met a woman like Susie--one whose very existence is a memorial to the memory of her deceased husband, Major Augustus Parkington (Walter Pidgeon). This woman usually refers to her man as "The Major" or "Mister So And So". And inevitably, the man whose life she celebrates even in death was a real bastard, or at least someone very terribly flawed, making her love for him (supposedly) more heroic, more saintly. There is something to that. Gus was a man dedicated to Susie in his own way. And his love for her was not in compliance with society's rules. But he never bowed to the will of society.Later that night, Jane--the missing granddaughter--drops by to see Susie. She explains that she is leaving for Peru with a young man. This sparks the first of many flashbacks in the film. Back fifty-five years to Leaping Rock, Nevada--a small town built around a silver mine. Susie was only eighteen when she met Gus, owner of the mine.Up to this point in the film, I was enjoying its exposition. But somewhere after Leaping Rock the action slowed to a plodding pace. And the deficiencies in the script and the acting became apparent. Some of the words that come from the lips of the primary couple are inauthentic--at least as delivered. There is a scene where Susie confronts Gus upon realizing he has been working to destroy some men who dared to decline a dinner invitation. Here the acting is truly horrible. And it shows how an inauthentic moment can drag down a film.Maybe it's just me, but I found the incessant use of "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" in the background monotonous and annoying.Agnes Moorehead is wonderful as the Baroness Aspasia Conti, the woman who bridged the gap between Susie and Gus and helped them stay together. Hans Conreid is enjoyable in a smaller role as Mr. Ernst, the manager of a temperamental tenor.With all the talent involved, this film should have been better.

tjonasgreen This is an entertaining family saga from Louis Bromfield's novel, the kind of long, digressive trash wallow that still regularly tops best-seller lists. Essentially a subversive treatise on why inherited wealth is a bad thing, we observe the wealthy Mrs. Parkington as she copes with her selfish, dishonest middle-aged children in 1920s N.Y. while reminiscing about her stormy Gilded Age marriage to her late husband, a Wall Street cutthroat who made a vast fortune.Greer Garson wears a black wig in this role and -- surprisingly -- it really dims her luster. One misses that hair, so unmistakably red even in black and white, which usually illuminates her face. She also looks too old in the early scenes in which she's meant to be a teenager, and her acting is too arch in her scenes in old age. Even so, she's a suitable and sympathetic figurehead for this limousine ride of a movie. Walter Pidgeon is exactly what the part of the Robber Baron requires: physically imposing and masculine, stubborn and rakish by turns, he is never dynamic but always convincing.There are several worthwhile points of interest here: In a role that earned her a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, Agnes Moorehead gives a vivid performance as the French mistress that Parkington insensitively presses into service to make his wife the queen of N.Y. society. Moorehead's efficient acting suggests everything about this woman's precarious existence as well has her combination of artifice and pragmatism. She's like a character out of Trollope. A slightly lesser revelation is Gladys Cooper, cast against type and showing surprising depths of cynicism as a suicidal playgirl. In addition, the film is more frank and relaxed about sexual philandering (both pre-and extra-marital) than one would expect from an MGM film of 1944. And several of the sets, most notably the spectacular rendering of the Parkington mansion on Fifth Avenue (including an entry hall that doubles as a ballroom, complete with two endlessly curving staircases and a colonnade of pillars that leads to a dining hall seating 100) are prime examples of the opulent art direction one routinely enjoys in Hollywood pictures of the '40s.Finally, although the first third of the film sometimes drags, there are two excellent set pieces that are beautifully constructed and lovingly detailed by director Tay Garnett. The first is a Parkington dinner party to which N.Y.'s 400 are invited -- the pervasive tension and gradual buildup to disaster are really memorable here, as is the use of the film's most impressive set. The second is a very droll bit of drawing room comedy during which Mrs. Parkington meets and enlists the aid of the Prince of Wales to win back her husband from the clutches of an English society hostess. The polite bitchery between the ladies is delightful. Prospective viewers can decide if this list of pleasures justifies a look at this luxe movie.