Runaway Future

Starting at the beginning of September, I’ve been fortunate enough to regularly view classic films with a neighbour of mine.  I’m going to attempt to chronicle those sessions in a new section that I’m calling “Sundays at Seven”.

In our first week, we watched the film The Heiress. Made in 1949, the film is set in the mid-1800s and focuses on a young woman (the titular heiress) who has been unlucky in love, but then finds herself the object of affection for a smooth young man. Although his intentions are never made completely clear, her father suspects he’s more interested in her inheritance than her love and certainly the suitor’s actions mirror these suspicions.

The film doesn’t have a happy ending for any of the main characters. The heiress ends up alone, the father passes away and the suitor is rejected and continues to be penniless.

I really enjoyed this film, not just because of the strong acting (the actor who plays the father is particularly effective as a cruel parent who often is eager to point out his daughter’s shortcomings), but also because despite the actual film being more than 60 years old and the story itself being set much farther back, it still felt extremely contemporary in story. It felt like something that could be told in today’s cinema. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wasn’t the only one to think that: the film was remade in 1997 as Washington Square.

We also watched two episodes of the Twilight Zone.

In the first, The New Exhibit, a man becomes obsessed with the wax figures of five famous murderers (creepily done as heavily made-up actors, it was unnerving to see them stand there as wax figures, swaying ever so slightly). Bringing the figures home, they eventually begin to murder anything that threatens their existence, including the man’s wife, brother-in-law and former boss, before turning on their care-taker.

In the second, Of Late I Think Of Cliffordville, a businessman who has achieved everything that he wishes to do and is as successful as he can be, makes a deal with the devil to go back in time to his old home town and start all over again. As with any deal of the nature, the devil is in the details (to excuse the phrase) and things don’t work out as planned, leaving the man lost and making a bad deal to return to the future, where he finds that it was his janitor who enjoyed the success that he once celebrated. Julie Newmar is nothing short of stunningly attractive as the devil, while Albert Salmi is a very convincing blustery and boasting businessman.