giornata, 1/23/25

camel coats, two romances, and Tchaikovsky

Giornata is my weekly media diary, coming out Thursdays, covering whatever I read, watched or listened to in the last week!

Love Story (1970, Arthur Hiller)

Non-Romance, Romance on The Count of Monte Cristo is still coming, but I’m waiting for that to be available on streaming to release that one. I was at a loss of what to pick this month. Even after I saw Love Story at PFS East last Thursday, I thought “well, you can’t do Love Story, she dies at the end. It’s too fair afield.”

But Love Story is actually a great example of a piece of art that I want to write about in the series. Some things that I write about there are, to me, romance novels, in that I experience the sensation as a reader the same arc as reading a romance, or there are elements of genre fiction hiding in something that appears to be a thriller or a book of essays. Love Story is not that, but it is a cultural phenomenon that happened in a couple of years that are a watershed moment for romance. I think it is silly to think that a movie called LOVE STORY, whose novelization was read by a fifth of the country, according to a Gallup Poll, has no relationship to genre romance. At the very least, many authors and readers who were part of the 1970s boom of romance were watching Love Story.

The non-romance, romance on the film will come out Monday. Meanwhile, this is what my The RealReal favorites and moodboard looks like right now.

I have a singular focus

Don’t Bother to Knock (1952, dir. Roy Ward Baker)

I watched this hoping I would get something out of Marilyn Monroe as an actress that I haven’t before. She is simply not one of my tragic Hollywood actresses.¹ I love Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but I can’t imagine I would if Jane Russell wasn’t there, being brunette and I basically get her a comedic actress, though I really dislike Some Like It Hot. I rewatch Some Like It Hot every few years because so many people whose tastes in old comedies that align with mine adore it. I generally love Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond collaborations, but I just never laugh at Some Like It Hot. Marilyn is cute when she jumps out of the way of the steam on the train though.

Don’t Bother to Knock was Monroe’s first starring role, billed above the title along with Richard Widmark (who I love from Night and the City, 1950 dir. Jules Dassin). Monroe is supposed to be the stand out here, but the shallowness of the post WWII psychological thriller collapses around her performance. Her typically breathy voice is channeled into a quiet (until it isn’t quiet anymore) anxiety of Nell Forbes, a woman who lost her pilot boyfriend during the war and who is now fixating on a pilot she meets at a hotel while taking a job as a babysitter to a little girl named Bunny. The whole thing is framed around Widmark’s character trying to win back his girlfriend, a lounge singer in the hotel played by Anne Bancroft. The singer had dumped him because he seems to lack a level of empathy for other people and his actions toward Nell for most of the movie continue that lack of feeling, though he is redeemed by the narrative and in the eyes of his girlfriend by the end.

The child in danger named Bunny makes me think of the much more successful union of detective story and psychiatric thrills of Bunny Lake is Missing (1965, dir. Otto Preminger) where a daughter goes missing and evidence seems to suggest, despite the mother’s insistence, that the daughter never existed.

I’m still not writing off Monroe completely. I was just disappointed by this after hearing it touted as a hidden gem where she stands out above the roteness of it all. The hotel setting and the sympathetic blonde with a distinctive voice at the center also reminded me of Born Yesterday (1950, dir. George Cukor) starring Judy Holliday and that’s never going to be a fair comparison for any movie.

Indiscreet by Mary Balogh

I had two great Balogh books in a row (Simply Unforgettable and A Precious Jewel) so I was due for a frustrating one, though the more distance I have from it, the more I appreciate it.

Catherine Winters is a young widow giving music lessons in a sleepy hamlet. Viscount Rawleigh is the twin of her landlord and when he pays a visit to his brother’s house for a few weeks, he thinks an affair with country widow is the perfect entertainment. He earnestly misinterprets a few signals from Catherine as signs of her availability, but when he makes it clear he is interested in having an affair, she rebuffs him. Rawleigh is confused because he thinks she should know her behaviors are understood invitations. But now his interest is piqued, to the point where he considers offering her marriage just so he can sleep with her. So one night when Catherine wants to leave a ball early, he insists on walking her home. When she allows him to, he interprets it again as invitation, but she tells him no again. But this time, a villager sees him leave her home in the early hours of the morning and starts a rumor of an affair.

So even though no affair has taken place, Catherine is suspect. This suspicion is not aided by extreme jealously from Rawleigh’s sister-in-law over Catherine’s beauty, so the lady of the manor stokes the gossip fires. Rawleigh proposes a marriage of convenience to save her (and to slake his now all-consuming desires). Catherine eventually accepts, but reveals: she’s not a widow. She was living under an assumed identity because she became pregnant as the result of a rape and lost the child. Her support from her father is conditional on the assumed name and never returning to London—after Catherine refused to marry her rapist, her father sent her away and told society she was dead.

Rawleigh is not who I take issue with in Balogh’s universe. He is reprehensible and the second half of the book is him realizing and repairing that he is in the same category in Catherine’s mind as her rapist, though he always drew a line between himself and men who used physical force to gain sexual access. This kind of on the page reckoning by a hero of violence enacted is what I love about some of my favorite bodice rippers. I don’t think Balogh ever wrote a true bodice ripper, but I would put Indiscreet in the category with The Devil’s Web, where Balogh is taking bodice ripper conventions and filtering them through her Signet-style Regency lens. Again, this is the kind of thing I can’t imagine another author pulling off. And that’s the stuff, with distance, that I am think of favorably from this book.

My issue with the book, and my issue with nearly every Balogh book that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, is how Catherine’s father is treated in the book. When Rawleigh is preparing for a duel with Catherine’s rapist, he earnestly thinks “Her father and her brother would probably give her the emotional support she would need” if he should die in the duel. Her father, who told her younger brother and her friends that she had died, rather than accept a daughter who refused to marry her rapist, is supposed to be a emotional support for Catherine? Balogh has a habit of including forgiveness of parents, or even worse, apologies to parents from children who are victims of sexual assault or or at least, highly gendered trauma. For all of Rawleigh’s interior reckoning with how he has treated Catherine and what he can do to deserve her and correct his actions for her, her father gets an apology and forgiveness basically with no effort.

Fair, Bright and Terrible by Elizabeth Kingston

One Burning Heart was my best romance of last year published last year and now I’m going back to the backlist of the series to catch up. This is the second book in the Welsh Blades series and I might have enjoyed it more than One Burning Heart.

Kingston has a mentor in Laura Kinsale, and I feel like that influence screams in this book, in part because I feel like Kinsale, though one of our most talented romance novelists of all time, is out of fashion to look to for inspiration. Or, the ability to pull off what she does is so rare that nobody tries. This is a second chance romance unlike anything I’ve ever read before in that trope. So often the precipitating separation is a bad act or a need to marry for money or some sort of decision made by the couple and then there is animosity that needs to be worked through in the reunion.

Eluned and Robert had an affair during her marriage, while her husband being increasingly fanatical about crusades, a behavior that would lead to his death years later. She calls off the affair after her husband, only on the suspicion of a rumor, makes her perform a lengthy and demoralizing penance. But Robert never forgot her, pining after her for nearly twenty years. The interim for Eluned was different. While Robert was making his fortune in France as a winemaker and solider, Eluned was watching her native Wales become increasingly subjugated by and finally totally taken over by England. They are reunited when Eluned’s son, loyal to the English king, marries her off to a English man who will be given some property in Wales by the king in the new regime. Which man doesn’t really matter to the people arranging Eluned’s marriage.

Robert has always been hesitant to marry, since his brother has sons and he’s been pining for his lost love. But when his father recalls him home to marry to enrich the family and Robert discovers the candidate is Eluned, he jumps at the offer. Eluned only agrees to the marriage because she thinks it might give her a chance to get revenge on Roger Mortimer for his crimes against Wales.

The separated and reunited lovers could not be further apart in their approach to their marriage. While second chance romances are so common in the genre, I’ve never read a character who changed so much between the first timeline and second as Eluned has. Robert’s journey is about seeing her for who she is now, and Eluned’s is realizing that the woman he once loved is still a part of her. The whole book was so good I wanted to run my head through a wall over it.

Robbie Williams Breaks Down 18 Memorable Looks from 1990 to Now, British Vogue

I’m also still on a Robbie Williams thing. I’ve watched this video three times this week.

The Countess Conspiracy, Courtney Milan

This is going to be the first episode of Season 3 of Reformed Rakes. An all-time favorite and stand out from the last 15 years of romance.

Symphony No. 6 “Pathetique”, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

I’m returning to the Philadelphia Orchestra this weekend to see this, Tchaikovsky’s last symphony. He’s just my main guy and I’ve been listening to the Bernstein recording all week.

1. Gene Tierney and Rita Hayworth