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Re: AFI 100 Years Series Discussion & Challenges, vol. 2
If you ever get a chance to watch 2001 in 35mm or 70mm, take it, you'll like it even better and it really makes an enormous difference.
I always forget about the father in Philadelphia Story but it is a bit of a problem to modern sensibilities. However by that time I'm having so much fun with this drunken mess of a family that I don't care. there is a definite relationship between Mike and Liz, but it's a subtle piece of acting on both their parts, I think you'd pick it up better on a second viewing.
There's an interesting 1939 film, also directed by George Cukor, called the Women. there are no men in the film at all, and a big part of the plot revolves aroun adultury and divorce and the conflict between the earlier generation of women that's forgive and forget and the new generation of women that want him to get what he deserves (ie divorce him because he's a bastard). Naturally, there is a suggestion of reunification at the end but you find that in modern comedies about divorce as well. So in that context it seems more understandable that the mother would take her husband back because that's what people of her generation (and class/position) did, while Katherine Hepburn would be furious at the thought of her mother taking him back, because that's an ideal women of her generation were fighting against. They wanted the right and social acceptance to be able to divorce an unfaithful man/unfit husband.
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