“Millions of women…”

Movie review:

A Doll’s House (1973)

Starring Anthony Hopkins, Claire Bloom

Director: Patrick Garland

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House (1879)

Claire Bloom won Best Actress award at 1973 Taormina International Film Festival

If you’re a fan of Ibsen’s stark, unforgiving play, you’ll love this film.

Both play and film have the same undercurrent of desperation. Hopkins as Torvald Helmer faultlessly offers bland, devastating condescension to Claire Bloom as Nora, whose despair grows ever more public as she realizes that she has drowned herself in the domestic dead end of being Torvald’s “doll-wife.”

If you ache, like me, to bash Torvald and comfort Nora as you watch the pervasive and thinly veiled brutality in the Helmer household, then you, like me, must realize how much you wish it could be unimaginable in any way…but in vain…

    Title page, A Doll’s House, Ibsen’s handwritten manuscript

Nora tells her husband that she had hoped he would take the blame for her transgression, and the disdainful Torvald rebukes her: “…one doesn’t sacrifice one’s honor for love’s sake.”

Nora replies with quiet thunder: “Millions of women have done so.”

Enfin, we understand how Nora could be too hurt to cry, and too happy to remain in a doll’s house…

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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

St. Ives, another look…

Less than meets the eye

by Robert Louis Stevenson

(a book review)

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