![]() It does mean he determined to maintain a comforting presence, finally. ![]() Probably he saw he was not up to enacting the edgy-neurotic aspects of Rhett. This means his movies are finally limited to show us a character who rises to a civilized response to others. He actually was offered (it’s said) the role of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind and refused (!). ![]() ![]() He limited the number of movies he’d do as well as kind: he would not play in pro-imperial films, not films which were pro-violence, nothing reinforcing injustice, and also chose roles where restraint, understatement, and a certain lightness and suavity combined with responsibility were parts of the role and enabled him to keep his guard up. The real explanation it came to me as I watched these two films and remembered the others I have seen is that Colman himself refused to move further into the demonic, would not challenge himself yet further to reach troubling levels of angry brilliance. This does not provide the real explanation for why he never became a prevailing male icon in the way of James Cagney, Humphry Bogart, or Grant, Gable, Flynn (etcetera, etcetera), though certainly upbeatness, ceaseless competition to satisfy appetites, and the supposed admirable amoral cunning of the “ordinary guy” please crowds who turn from most things intellectual and psychologically subversive. What draws me is his repeated enactments of levels of melancholy, despair, enactment of mentally unstable personalities, who turn to alcohol and retreat, find refuge in private worlds we are given no access to. Certainly that’s the central presence he enacts in the comic Talk of the Town, and (as I recall) the romantic action-adventure Prisoner of Zenda, with (in TofTT) some strong tolerant disillusion, and ( PofZ), dashing debonair heroisms & chivalry in swordplay and jumping from one height to another (with Douglas Fairbanks Junior) thrown in.Ĭolman as Rudolf Rudolph Rassendyll in The Prisoner of Zendaīut now I know that’s not what draws me. Dixon Smith’s Ronald Colman, Gentleman of the Cinema: A biography and filmography and Sam Frank’s Ronald Colman: A bio-bibliography), I thought my father was right, only that he left out my Anglophilia and love of Colman’s sort of melancholy wit, ironic stance towards life, and distinctive resonant voice. Why did I like Colman? My father said I was drawn to the dignified noble gentleman, that it was an aspect of my love of British novels, tendency to idealize until I watched these two films with some thoughtfulness, and began reading two books I have had in the house for ever so long and only just now really gave myself a chance to read (R. Their favorite actor would be a teenage or 20+ year old rock star (Fabian?), or omeone they just saw in an action-adventure or Peyton Place kind of movie, or was famous that year on TV. Once in a while I was asked politely who Ronald Colman was. When I was about 13 I would tell anyone who asked me, “Who is your favorite actor?”, “Why, Ronald Colman, of course.” If the person was someone who watched old movies on Channel 9, there was a chance he or she might have heard of Colman, but since most people I talked to were not the types who watched such movies (they would be people around my age), they’d look at me as if I were mad. I’m hoping to go on to re-see his The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), and watch for the first time The Light that Failed (1939), and A Double Life (1947).Ĭolman as John Arthur with Shelley Winter in A Double Life (for which he won an Oscar) I’d decided since rewatching Colman’s The Talk of the Town and recreating my blog-review of it, that I’d try to go on to watch more movies closely associated with Colman. This weekend I went onto the 1942 WW2 film, Random Harvest, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, screenplay Claudine West, George Froeschel and Arthur Wimperis, again from a James Hilton novel (1941) of the same name, starring (once again) Ronald Colman as Smithy/Charles Ranier, and supported basically by Greer Garson as Paula Ridgeway/Paula Hanson. Last week I managed to watch a digitally restored, almost complete (137 minutes) version of the once famous 1937 Lost Horizon, directed by Frank Capra, screenplay Robert Riskin from James Hilton’s 1933 utopian/dystopian novel of the same name, starring Ronald Colman as Robert Conway, supported by Thomas Mitchell, Gloria Stone, Jane Wyatt, Sam Jaffe, John Howard, and Edward Everett Horton, together with about an hour and one half of features on the film (history of the cuts, how it was put together, how it has been restored). Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, said to be his favorite role
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