I am an Anglophile

I have just started watching “The Criterion Collection”, a four-film set entitled, “David Lean Directs Noel Coward”.  I started with “Brief Encounter”.  Besides a perfect remastering of the original film, Criterion has added special features of most of the people involved, talking about the film, the production, and the people involved.  That is what makes the difference between just watching the movie and almost studying it.

I want to hold back on watching, for my first time, the next three.  I’m hoping to find like-minded people, who can watch the special features, either before or after the film [vote] and will have the time to discuss the film.  The next three in the collection are: “Blithe Spirit”, “This Happy Breed”, and “In Which We Serve”.   I want to do “Brief Encounter” again, at the end – it is England’s best picture ever.

We could do these over four weeks, on a specific night; or two days in a row; or over a weekend.  Meals, snacks, wine, popcorn, guests all in the mix.

I am a self-confessed, avowed Anglophile – no denials.  I acquired this affliction on my summer-tour of Europe in 1960, between my 4^th and 5^th year at University [Arizona] – I was not a bright student.

Landing in London for the first time in my life was awe-inspiring – hearing the mother-tongue a revelation.  Jet-lagged, I got up at 4am that first day and rode the tube all over town, stopping at an early am fish market, and then a bulk vegetable purveyor, ate “things” – winding up in some suburb where I stole a glass bottle of milk and a newspaper, and back at the hotel for the 9am tourist breakfast, but having seen and heard a glimpse of Dickens.

In my 5^th year [2 required courses], one I took was a fun course in British WW-I poets: Owen, Sassoon, and Brooke.  This graduate, expert’s class was for MFAs in English – the instructor told me she would not grade me, but I would get an “A” if I spoke my mind.   I did – “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” still makes me cry.

The clincher to my Anglophilic tendencies, however, was spending six years, mid-eighties, as an ex-pat, living and working in non-London England.  Half those years I was single, and the other half married, to an out of (above) my class English woman, who was a brilliant, Cambridge graduate (in English).

Some people of my age group yearn for those rock and roll times of Elvis, the Beatles, and smooth jazz, of their teens, which may have been their best times.  My memorable era was this eighties period in England, where I underwent another growth spurt.  So, I still associate “Hitchhikers Guide” (radio), and “Smiley’s People” (TV) with England.

Now that I am beginning to try and put together a regular weekly film viewing group, I am letting show my natural predilection towards British film, and I’m looking for ways to support a sub group of like-minded people, that might like-wise be willing to watch more than one British film a year.