84 Charing Cross Road

This movie would have been adored by Miss Fiske and I too, to see it as she did. I almost liked it myself because the film “84 Charing Cross Road” is made for those who love London and books. The only problem with the movie is that its heroine does not get to London until it is too late and nobody reads in this movie anyway.

The film was based on a hit play in London and New York which was itself based on a best-seller. That’s already miraculous given such slight and unlikely subject matter but for some reason some of them go for this crap. I should know, I read the book, saw the play and now am reviewing the movie; yet from my point of view, the basic idea doesn’t seem to sound right even now.

London was still a bombed out hole in the earth filled with people who were hungry after World War II.

In Saturday Review ad section, a New York lady (Anne Bancroft) sees an advertisement for a bookstore in London something that hitherto didn’t exist. Being glad about receiving various used books including good reading copies available at cheap prices soon afterwards she sends her want list to them. She starts corresponding with an Anthony Hopkins (bookseller), thus beginning a relationship without ever meeting one another throughout their lives.

There isn’t much action going on here. It all happens at the post office really. David Jones does what he can do. His last picture was Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” which told a love story backwards, starting with an unhappy ending and ending with two lovers’ first kiss. Now he has got one where they don’t meet each other; what shall he go for next: autoeroticism?

Bancroft sends care packages of ham to postwar England; Hopkins sends rare editions of Boswell, Chesterton, Cardinal Newman (“Dear John Henry,” Bancroft calls him). Bancroft leads a solitary existence in her New York apartment. Hopkins is part of a quiet marriage in a London bedroom suburb. After several years, Hopkins dies and later on, Bancroft finally goes to London and visits the now-empty bookstore.

This is Miss Fiske mentioned earlier in the first paragraph of this review; she was our librarian at the Urbana Free Library when I was young. She filled me with such a love for books that even today I still search for them in used bookstores; I loved Elizabeth Enright’s Melody Family stories first (“real books”). Miss Fiske organized the puppet shows and the book club as well as Saturday morning story hours and book fairs. I never had to tell her about my love for books because she talked it all out and then I picked it up from there.

This movie she would have loved. I am guessing that sitting next to her, I too could have enjoyed it. However, Miss Fiske is dead now and I found it a rather dragging experience by myself. Likewise, Miss Fiske had an acridly analytic intellectuality and after watching this movie, she might have agreed by nodding her head, saying that she liked it but then added “Why didn’t that mad woman just board the ship and fly to London 10 years before?” So that was one stupid way of wasting a lot of postage.

I think this film would have appealed to her. Next to her on that seat, I assume even I would have adored the film. Nevertheless, miss fiske has passed away and personally found it a bit slow for me. She was also very intelligent in her criticism and if she were here today having watched this movie may well say “yes I like it” before adding “why didn’t this crazy lady just go onto the boat to London 10years back?” Just such a dumb way of expending much money in postal services.

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