[lit-ideas] "Those Vile Bodies"

From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 18:32:25 EDT
--- Went to see "Bright Young Things" yesterday, and enjoyed it. It's  
Stephen Fry's frank adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 1930 novel, _Vile Bodies_ -- 
as  
per the famous 'stream of consciousness' by Adam Symes:
 
"Oh, Nina, _what a lot of parties." (... Masked parties, Savage parties,  
Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus  
parties, partines where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties 
 
in St. John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and 
hotels  and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school 
where  one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where 
one drank  brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London 
and 
comic  dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris -- all that 
succession and  repetition of massed humanity ... Those vile bodies."
 
---- S. Fry has said he was talked into changing the title from 'Vile  
Bodies' to "Bright Young Things" (the novel Symes wrote) "by people who  
complained 
that 'Vile Bodies' sounded like a movie about a  morgue." My favourite 
character in the film, played by brilliant  Fenella Wolgar, anyways, dies in a 
kind 
of morgue-ish scene, anyway.
 
There are, for what they're worth, a couple of references to exotic  places 
in the original novel, -- not in the film:
 
   "Have you heard of your daughter lately?"
   "The last we heard was worse than anything. She
     has left Buenos Aires. I am afraid she has  severed her
     connection with Lady Metroland altogether". (p.  27). 
 
    "At intervals letters arrived from Buenos Aires in
    which Chastity and Divine Discontent spoke rather
    critically of Latin American entertainment." (p.  151).
 
For some reason, Fry adapts the novel so that it covers the 1939s and  indeed 
part of the "Phony War" and its aftermath. 
 
The soundtrack is worth a note, in its being slightly anachronistic: we  hear 
Noel Coward's recording of "Senorita Nina (from Argentina)" -- which was a  
1940 song, along with "Dance, Little Lady" -- referred to a character as a  
'latest hit', when it was already 'old' by 1925), the symbolic "Twentieth  
Century Blues", and, the one put to best dramatic effect, "The Party's Over  
Now". 
(The soundtrack also includes period pieces like the wartime classic  "Mares 
Eats Oats").
 
The cast includes some cameo performances by Sir John Mills (as a  cocaine 
addict), Peter O'Toole, as a stately-home resident, and Imelda Staunton  (as 
the 
Prime Minister's wife) --.
 
Cheers,
 
JL
 

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[lit-ideas] "Those Vile Bodies"

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