The urge to reach through time and smack the cameraman around for a closer shot may very well have pushed Selznick to prove what a capable producer could do with the young actress. After a period spent in convalescence at the estate of Spanish enemy Don Miguel, he returns and sweeps up his Cynthia in an embrace that’s kept, maddeningly, to the bottom left quadrant of a screen otherwise occupied by empty palace walls. The one scene in which viewers might see where Selznick was coming from reunites Leigh with her dashing love interest and the picture’s real hero, played by Laurence Olivier.
STORM IN A TEACUP FILM CRACK
Utterly lifeless, the film seems intent on embodying all the worst stereotypes of costume dramas, not least at the expense of Leigh herself, who fully earns a crack from Flora Robson’s Queen Elizabeth I calling her a “fluttering flibbertigibbet”. It is difficult to watch Fire Over England and feel any sense of inspiration at all. Selznick to bring Leigh to American shores for a massive studio epic called Gone With the Wind. They make one wonder whether Leigh is really a main selling point of these pictures at all.įire Over England (1936), the first and most deeply regrettable selection of the entire set, is said to be the picture that inspired David O. Yet it’s those very same collaborators that prove fatal to this collection’s sense of purpose, if such a thing exists.
One could begin by waxing poetic on those big green eyes (which is already difficult, since all the films are in black-and-white), the jut of her chin, her ability to project a shrewd, implacable intelligence opposite actors like Laurence Olivier, Conrad Veidt, Rex Harrison, and the great Charles Laughton. It would be so much easier to talk about Cohen Media’s Vivien Leigh Anniversary Collection if the films contained therein actually made a convincing case for Leigh’s deserving of such a four-film set.
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