For Valentine’s Day, TYG and I watched an old favorite of mine, LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS (1970). It’s based on a play consisting of several separate short pieces but improves considerably on the original by interweaving them, so it’s part of one overall story. The setting is Michael Brandon and Bonnie Bedelia’s wedding as Anne Meara and Harry Guardino debate masculinity (“Those Marine sergeants you admire are a bunch of faggots!”), Bea Arthur and Richard Castellano try to convince their son not to divorce Diane Keaton and self-serving adulterer Gig Young explains his hands are tied (“It’s all up to Phil.”). Very good, though very much a period piece, not only in fashion but in current-events references (the Columbia student riots and the movie CHE, about Che Guevera), plus the subplot of Brandon and Bedelia having hidden the fact they’re living together from their parents (which was such an odd idea to TYG she didn’t pick up on it until the end). “Am I a runaway train you want to board for the night, or are you interested in my spirit as well as my body?”
When Netflix stopped carrying the old TV show Kung Fu, I decided to get my own set, which kicks off with the pilot film KUNG FU (1972). This alternates back and forth between a young Eurasian boy (Radames Pera) training as a Shaolin monk in 1800s China and adult Kwai Chang Kaine traveling in the Old West. As we learn what drove Kaine to America, we see him in the present going to work for murderous railroad-builder Albert Salmi and inevitably defending the Chinese laborers from his brutality. This might lose some of its impact now—martial arts were a lot more exotic back in those days—but it’s still darn good. And I wish more super-hero stories would use this kind of flashback structure so that we aren’t forever stuck on origin reboots. “When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, it is time to leave.”
