No pretensions.

Given my past pretensions galore as a movie aficionado http://digbig.com/4xypw it feels good to stumble upon a non-pretensions black-and-white movie with straight forward story-telling and no fancy camera work now and again. That's where TCM is so good for my soul, mates. Yesterday morning, I happened to find there the clunkily and portentously titled Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945). http://digbig.com/4xypx. It has that wonderfully versatile Romanian-American actor, Edward G Robinson, playing the part of a Norwegian farmer in Wisconsin during World War II. Martinus Jacobson is kind and considerate, very fond of his seven-year old daughter, Selma (Margaret O'Brien. He does not believe in spoiling her, though, and even makes her give away her skates, a birthday gift, to her 5-year-old best friend and constant companion, Arnold, because of her failure to share then with him. The simple story moves at a placid place and ends with Selma giving away her calf to a neighbour whose barn has burned down and thereby triggering off a flood of gifts from other members of the community. For a reason I could not fathom, this movie caught my attention and fancy and I could not stop myself from watching it till the end. An additional bonus was Agnes Moorehead in the role of Selma's mother and a simple housewife, so different from the many cynical and acerbic roles elsewhere I have always admired her for.

Strictly for voyeurs.

That’s correct. Watching movies is in essence a voyeuristic avocation. Not in the prurient but in the broad sense of the term. After all, when you’re watching a movie, you’re looking at or witnessing what’s happening or what someone is doing without (apparently) their knowledge and consent – in order to derive pleasure. Except, in those once-in-a-while asides, when the character actually addresses the camera, that is to say, (by proxy) you. In every voyeuristic encounter, the subject’s privacy is violated, intentionally or otherwise.. In the strictest psychological sense, voyeurism is a sexual disorder where “sexual arousal … involves the act of observing unsuspecting individuals, usually strangers, who may be naked or in the process of disrobing. Even engaging in sexual activity.” The so-called x-rated blue films meet this psychological definition of voyeurism. http://www.psychnet-uk.com/dsm_iv/voyerism_disorder.htm. (The other side of the voyeuristic coin is exhibitionism. In other words, the actors who perform for the camera are exhibitionists.) Voyeurism of the prurient variety is believed to be caused by childhood trauma such as sexual abuse or accidental sighting of naked adults, copulation, etc. Voyeurism of the movie-watching kind may be caused in the present times by the parents’ excessive addiction to television and movie watching on VCDs and DVDs as well as in the multiplexes. Once infected, seldom freed. It’s a lifetime addiction. And heaven help those victims who are abysmally devoid of taste and discrimination. They end up watching the worst kind of trash spewed by the film makers out to make a quick buck. [P.S.: Tangentially speaking, you’ve got to consider a real huge difference between real life and reel life. In the latter, you have close-ups, zooms (in and out), freezes, quick cuts and so on to help the story telling which the former lacks. So what you see on the screen cannot be compared strictly speaking with what you see – and ‘experience’ – in life. Even in dreams, for that matter. Have you noticed how far removed the dream sequences in movies are from dreams in real life? Keep all these things in mind, boys and girls, the next time you think of cinematic reality.]

Actors = cattle. (So, where's the Hitch?)

Carole Lombard died young. In 1942, when she was just 34. It was a mere one year after whe starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Mr & Mrs Smith, one of his earlier films shot in the US. (It seems he directed it on Carole's special request. He must have had high regards for her.) She was reputedly a great comedienne. She also must have had a great sense of humour - off camera. The most famous instance of it concerned Hitchcock. He was reputed to have said somewhere, no doubt in an unguarded moment, that actors were cattle. The remark had been widely quoted all over. Taking a cue from these words, Carole arranged for a troop of oxen to be let loose on the sound stage one afternoon and promptly left for home. I couldn't find any record of the mayhem that must have resulted. This leads me to wonder if the story is apocryphal. Later, however, Hitch tried to do some damage control by explaining that he had actually said actors should be treated as cattle. Game point and set to Ms Lombard.

It’s only a film.

Ashok Kumar was one hell of an endearing actor. Totally a non-cliché, non-method performer who claimed to have told a fellow artiste of the opposite persuasion: "Hey Charlie. It's only a film. Take it easy," he later laughingly admitted to film critic Khalid Mohamed that he had borrowed the idea from Hitch. By and by, he became the quintessential actor who never was, I daresay. He wanted to be a film technician when he left Bhagalpur for Bombay, you see. I'm certain he was fallible. I'm equally certain he would have been the first to admit it. He was terrified of his very first heroine (Devika Rani, I suspect), he confessed. The first of his last two films I saw on the idiot box a week before his exit from the divinely produced, directed and scripted movie we all feature in was Khoobsoorat, c. 1980. In it, he kept calling his soon-to-be 'bahu' (Rekha) "girl friend". The other one, called Harfan Maula (1976), was full of cinematic clichés one associates with the seventies' Bollywood comedy-thrillers. (In the Ultraindia.com filmography, 'HM' is listed as a 'family drama', though.) So what? Each one of them was "only a film", as he would have said. An Ashok Kumar Filmography of sorts can be found at http://www.ultraindia.com/movies/filmography/filmography.php?choice=2&na=Ashok%20Kumar.