Alright, a lot to catch up on so I'll plough through them. Over a year ago I caught the last 40 mins of a 2 hour Garbo programme on the biography channel and at the weekend I saw it all apart from the opening 20 mins. Anyway, that led me to remember that I'd found and downloaded over a VERY long time all of her version of The Painted Veil, which I saw the first hour or so of again, about a year ago. I described it then as "a great screenplay, very quotable and Garbo is just divine" and that's certainly the case.

It's rather difficult to take it on its own merits, having being done recently with Naomi Watts and Ed Norton, but it certainly hits all the right notes as a vehicle for Garbo. The balance of this version is very much on the side of the love triangle rather than the couple's relationship once they go "inland". I always enjoy Herbert Marshall and he's spot on as the reserved Somerset Maugham leading man, George Brent is a very solid actor too, but it's the Garbo show. The tone is so light and playful, the score is wonderfully silly but Garbo does her traditional economical most with the least. To compare the two leading performances in this and the remake is impossible because they require completely different things from the actresses, but Garbo gives the kind of turn where you're watching it and aware how good she is, whereas Naomi is the kind who gets under your skin and it's only the next day when doing something random that you realise that she was brilliant. That said though, the 30s version is far more entertaining and given a choice between the two *films*, I'd watch that one of the two.

Greta Garbo

Okay, that's two paragraphs and I've only done one, I'll blast through this. Staying with the recent tv movie theme, in a fit of boredom I saw A Killing in a Small Town, solely because it had Barbara Hershey in it and she is an actress I like. This wasn't a very good offering, the acting was fine but the director (Stephen Gyllenhaal) sometimes totally loses the plot tone-wise and has these massive emotions come out from nowhere. Out of morbid curiosity I also saw Spy Hard, Leslie Nielsen "comedy" (I beg to differ ) take on the James Bond films. Given how consistently it falls flat if I hadn't seen Austin Powers, I'd be convinced this just wasn't a genre you could lampoon. Very shoddy effort, much more in the vein of Dracula: Dead and Loving It, than The Naked Gun, poor stuff.

I had a rewatch (for the first time in about 10 years) of Chaplin which was more watchable now having seen his films although at times it did seem a puff piece of apologetics for the joys of shagging jailbait. I also tried to watch Carmen Jones, I'm not the biggest fan of the music and I wasn't keen on the words or the setting. After about an hour I had an invitation to go to the pub and I gladly accepted it as neither Dorothy Dandridge nor Harry Belafonte were doing anywhere near enough acting-wise to retain my interest. I did though catch most of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral tonight with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. Lancaster was in snooze mode as Wyatt Earp, but Douglas stole the show and was very fun as Doc Holliday. Very nice to see Rhonda Fleming in support, not a wonderful film, but a more than solid one which I enjoyed.