![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Odd movie: Roddy McDowell's Tam Lin AKA The Ballad of Tam Lin AKA The Devil's Widow
So after working on the Tam Lin story I googled around to see all the various versions, and in addition to Pamela Dean's wonderful first novel, the Fairport Convention song, Jane Yolen's novel, and many others, found this weird movie. Glad I didn't find it before writing, as it's also set in the 60's--but in England and Scotland, so quite different from mine.
It's Roddy McDowell's only directing effort, and one can see why--not great cinema, but at the same time so strange in some ways that I didn't regret the time and money it took. I suspect Ava Gardner (one of my favorite actresses) wished this hadn't been her last leading role--Night of the Iguana was a much more fitting swan song for her--but she was perfect, and the very strange, Timothy Dalton-looking Ian McShane made a great Tam Lin. Some of the dialog is horrendous, some of the shots too hokey to watch, but the whole thing is intriguing, esp. the scenes with Ava, of course, and the shape/shifting ending. And some of the shots really work well, for me, at least. Martin Scorcese liked it enough to revive it--that's something.
McDowell and/or the writers chose to make it all realistically plausible, which works OK for them, but not my choice. Nor is the idea of the Faerie Queen as the Older Woman (Mrs Robinson and then some) what I did, but now I contemplate telling the story from her POV, though after Valente's Ice Puzzle and all the Wicked hoopla, I guess the whole witch-view thing has been pre-empted.
So after working on the Tam Lin story I googled around to see all the various versions, and in addition to Pamela Dean's wonderful first novel, the Fairport Convention song, Jane Yolen's novel, and many others, found this weird movie. Glad I didn't find it before writing, as it's also set in the 60's--but in England and Scotland, so quite different from mine.
It's Roddy McDowell's only directing effort, and one can see why--not great cinema, but at the same time so strange in some ways that I didn't regret the time and money it took. I suspect Ava Gardner (one of my favorite actresses) wished this hadn't been her last leading role--Night of the Iguana was a much more fitting swan song for her--but she was perfect, and the very strange, Timothy Dalton-looking Ian McShane made a great Tam Lin. Some of the dialog is horrendous, some of the shots too hokey to watch, but the whole thing is intriguing, esp. the scenes with Ava, of course, and the shape/shifting ending. And some of the shots really work well, for me, at least. Martin Scorcese liked it enough to revive it--that's something.
McDowell and/or the writers chose to make it all realistically plausible, which works OK for them, but not my choice. Nor is the idea of the Faerie Queen as the Older Woman (Mrs Robinson and then some) what I did, but now I contemplate telling the story from her POV, though after Valente's Ice Puzzle and all the Wicked hoopla, I guess the whole witch-view thing has been pre-empted.