Gotham Diary:
Umami
6 June 2013
Who knew? Who knew that there was a movie, made in 1948 (the year of my birth), about Sophia Dorothea, Electress of Hannover and mother of George II — but never Queen of England, owing to her mad idea that she could be as unfaithful as her husband. That would be George I, surely the most unpopular of English monarchs, even including bad King John, who was at least bad. George I was, in the vernacular view, pompous and German and even more hypocritical than the English themselves. But this is not the time to indulge in corrective history. No, this is the time to say that the original Sophia Dorothea probably lacked the modest county dignity of her impersonator, Joan Greenwood. In the Ealing Comedies, Greenwood was always arch and ironic, but in Saraband she is noble, or as noble as a lady who falls for love can be. She is also somewhat generic, in Ealing’s first motion picture in colour, looking like any number of beautiful Hollywood starlets whose first chance at leading roles was never followed up. She doesn’t sound like them, of course. She sounds like Joan Greenwood, with the sexiest voice ever to speak English on film. Her prettiness in Saraband is a kind of kink.
Françoise Rosay is very good as the other Sophia Dorothea, the mother-in-law, the granddaughter of James I who was on terms of conversational equality with Leibniz and other worthies and who, had she lived another couple of months, would have been Queen of England in her own right. Instead of that, of course, we have a dutiful old lady who brings Martita Hunt to mind. From a movie buff/historian’s vantage, Flora Robson is the draw, because instead of playing Elizabeth I or somebody’s prim aunt, she’s a sultry schemer with a small waist and a light voice — she looks pretty Hanoverian herself, and sometimes just plain pretty. But despite the valiant and engaging performances of the three leading ladies, Saraband can’t survive the mauling of its men (Stewart Granger, utterly inexplicable; Peter Bull, impossibly overwigged; Anthony Quayle, words fail) and preposterous screenplay, which, gunning for historical accuracy, presumes that audiences will care about electoral politics for its own sake. The result is an Errol Flynn swashbuckler, made ten years later but with no less lurid Technicolor, with Joan Greenwood in the Olivia de Havilland part. That was good enough for me, but I’m in love with Joan Greenwood at the moment. She is the frog princess.
It’s hard to resist the idea that Saraband could have been made only under the Labour Government that followed World War II. The Tories would have considered it a libel on the royal family, of whom the adulteress was an ancestress. Tories are of course the people who believe that it’s a crime to speak unpleasant truths. If it weren’t for that signal defect, I’d probably be one of them.
***
Michael Pollan’s Cooking, beginning as it did with its celebration of fire and barbecue and Homer and men standing around “passing the jar,” did not immediately appeal to me. I have found the second part much more attaching. I’m delighted that Pollan is making a reasonably big deal about the gender bias that built up around kinds of cooking in almost all traditional societies, with men killing and roasting the meat and women pulverizing and boiling the grains. Like me, Pollan believes that this has to stop: men must learn how to chop onions without complaint. In passing, Pollan says something (to be quoted at another time) that makes me very sad about my own kitchen. People are always amazed that I produce “gourmet” dinners in such a small space, but the real problem with my kitchen is that it is that it is too small for two people — too small for the conversation that makes chopping onions a breeze. I know, because I built a wonderful kitchen in our country house, years ago, and everything good that I remember about that room involves talk.