女大不中留 Hobson's Choice(1954)
简介：
- 故事发生在十九世纪的英国，霍布森（查尔斯·劳顿 Charles Laughton 饰）经营着一家鞋铺，辛辛苦苦拉扯着三个女儿玛姬（布伦达·德·班泽 Brenda De Banzie 饰）、爱丽丝（达芙妮·安德森 Daphne Anderson 饰）和维奇（普鲁内拉·斯凯尔斯 Prunella Scales 饰）长大，一转眼，三个姑娘都已经到了谈婚论嫁的年纪，但吝啬的霍布森并不准备支付女儿们的嫁妆。
演员：
影评：
- 电影简介:
一个「三张兼过?庙」的鞋铺太子女何美娟，不甘心被老爹批死「苏州过后无艇搭」，更加不想「揳灶罅」，决定主动出击，寻找自己的「理想对象」，誓要扭转「下半世住姑婆屋」的命运。第一步当然是「搵老公」，于是美娟决定先出对头，然后逼造鞋泰斗莫威出对尾，实行逼婚大行动。做了大半世免费劳工，美娟今云决定另起炉灶，一于与老爹对抗到底，于是略施小计，不但令老爹从此不得发威，兼且乖乖把财产双手奉上；最后，还撮合了两个妹玉娟和惠娟的终身大事，终于大功告成，大团圆结局，所谓各得其所，皆大欢喜。 - 电影拍的很早，1954年，还是黑白的。出乎我意料的这竟是部喜剧，看来以后买碟必须把包装袋打开详细看看里面的介绍了。
电影不但是黑白的，其他的也保留着老电影的风格，要是看腻了现代重复的电影，看看这部换换口味，感觉还是很好的。恰到好处的配乐和戏剧式动作都令人看了之后反而感觉耳目一新。也许我们现在的电影太过于纪实，恰恰忘了电影也是一种舞台表现形式。
故事编的也很好，有点英式幽默的感觉，讽刺中见幽默，幽默时不忘讽刺，我想要是一句话总结这部电影的话，那就是这部电影很好的还原了一部很精彩的短篇小说 ，十分值得一看。 - 那句“By GUM”因为英语的时过境迁，显得很好玩~~转一个评论~
DAVID LEAN may not be known primarily for his comedies, but the two he made——1945's Blithe Spirit, based on the Noel Coward play, and then Hobson's choice in 1954——were exceptional, combining expertly timed broad humor with his always refined sense of Englishness. The gorgeous black-and-white Hobson's Choice is the more sublime of the two, ranking with the best Ealing Studio feathers of the period, well-known for their mirth and gentility. Yet it boasts a special distinction from the Ealing tradition, molded as it is by the sharp mind and artful hands of a meticulous cinematic visionary. By the time of Hobson's Choice, Lean was a proven master of storytelling, not through "perfectionism" but his exacting creation of mood, established by concentration on tempo, ambience, environment, and detailed behavior.
No Ealing or Gainsborough comedy surpasses the polished gleam of Hobson's Choice. Its brassy characters——blustery boot shop owner Henry Hobson(Charles Laughton), his stern eldest daughter, Maggie(Brenda De Banzie), and the timid shoemaker she marries, Will Mossop(John Mills)——are large-scare emblems of the British class system, representing its range of clashing types. Depicted with rousing vivacity, they inhabit an early twentieth-century setting that Lean conveys with his widely admired, signature sense of the real physical world; the polished-pewter beauty of Jack Hildyard's black-and-white photography gives even the cobblestone streets a tactile dimension.
Lean develop this hyperrealism as part of his cinematic character portraiture-----investigating British manners through archetypes that would be amusing and enlightening and, above all, as eminently recognizable as a Manchester street, an Edinburgh town house, a London flat. That was the gift of Lean's apprenticeship with playwright and theater titan Noel Coward. They worked together on the 1942 World War 2 film In Which We Serve, and also collaborated on the patriotic overview This Happy Breed(1944),a derivation of Coward's earlier British family epic Cavalcade(filmed by Frank Lloyd in 1933).The Lean-Coward films were not middlebrow jingoism; in each one, Lean showed an appreciation of how individual behavior----and the look of average lives----defines the national spirit. Theater suited Lean's preference for framing characters in a way that makes it possible to understand their existential circumstance and spiritual nature----best exemplified by his adaptations of Coward's plays, especially 1946's atmospheric Brief Encounter.
This scrutiny of British behavior was famously elaborated in Lean's Dickens adaptations Great Expectations and Oliver Twist----literary-cinema masterworks that combined imaginative folklore with classical British narrative tradition. Lean gave that tradition new life in Hobson's choice, based on theatrical warhorse by Harold Brighouse, first performed in the United States in 1915, perhaps as a caricature of Englishness. But Hobson's Choice was soon thereafter embraced by Britons, who approved Brighouse's farce as a genuine reflection of their own culture, habits, and humor. Lean responded to the play's vintage qualities, adapting it with the same inspiration he had Dickens----telling Henry, Maggie, and Will's story as imaginatively and as vividly as possible.
Staring with Malcolm Arnold's boisterous score, Hobson's Choice boasts an English music-hall spirit that connects this theatrical artifact to the popular realm of mass entertainment, but made sophisticated, as always with Lean. As a cinematic craftsman, Lean surely related to this story of skilled Manchester laborers whose personal drives pursue high standards of material quality, moral behavior, and social esteem. It is Lean's dramatic expertise and elegant workmanship that transform a crowd-pleasing formula of combative egos into a revelatory romance. The rousing and hilarious clash of wills----the father wrestles with his loss of authority, the daughter fights for her individuality, and the workman gains self-esteem and self-determination----preserves the midcentury concept of Britain as not only an empire but a land of articulate and ingenious authoritarians, legislators, and proud laborers: the British character idealized.
As in so many Lean films, the eccentricities displayed by Henry, Maggie, and Will are observed, revealed, and discovered to be timeless human attributes, as in classic British literature. Their comic actions recall the histrionic undercurrents that propel the Dickens melodramas. Laughton's bumptious patriarch mourns his waning authority when stern Maggie acts against her impending spinsterhood by setting her sights on Will. Already the functioning head of the family----taking the place of her deceased mother; even bossing around her two younger sisters----Maggie defies her father's oppression. "The dominion of one woman is paradise to the dominion of three," Henry complains to his cohorts at the Moonraker tavern. Lean favors each of Henry, Maggie, and Will's chosen prerogatives even as they are in hilarious conflict with one another. In the way, Lean satisfactorily enhances the Coward method, humanizing the most outrageous quirks of the British class system.
Henry drown his loss of control in drinking, Maggie effects her own emancipation, and Will gradually acquires his manhood and comes to social consciousness. Their development should be taken no less seriously than that of the protagonists of Lean's more famous dramatic films, since Lean applies the same fascination and affection here; this gives Hobson's Choice its comic strength. An examination of the empire's social manners and psychology is always at the core of Lean's narratives. When patriarchy's silly privileges(power and drink) go up against unstoppable forces of temperance, love, and early twentieth-century feminism, Hobson's Choice soars as a lampoon challenging the old order. Male tyranny is easily subverted through the functions of expert comic plotting. Henry may rant against the "rebellious females of this household," but Maggie's determination to have a man who loves her and a life of her own design becomes a viewer's delight.
One roots for Maggie, an underdog heroine whose virtues show in De Banzie's middle-aged figure and beaming, emotionally open face. The opposite of Ann Todd's emotionally secretive heroine in Lean's 1949 Madeleine, Maggie refuses to be subjugated; her liberation is the obverse of Madeleine's sexual, legalistic tragedy. The title Hobson's Choice comes from a familiar expression meaning lack of options; the play extends that meaning to Henry Hobson's inevitable giving in to his daughter's growing empowerment. Maggie doesn't acquiesce to her father's rule but acts on her own behalf. It is Henry who, ironically, has no choice and t accept the circumstances of Maggie and Will's marriage and business venture.
Maggie is one of Lean's strongest heroines; overwhelming the man in her world, she's force of nature like Katharine Hepburn's Susan in Bringing Up Baby. And Hobson's Choice is a similar no-choice romantic comedy. After the outrageous scene where Maggie confronts Will's lowly girlfriend and her virago mother, then permits Will to kiss her, the flabbergasted male can only submit; "It's like saying I agree to everything, a kiss is." The way Maggie, Will, and Henry anglicize the screwball comedy genre, pushing romantic determination into homegrown social upheaval, makes Hobson's Choice anything but lowbrow farce. Political truth lies inside its romantic premise. By marrying Will and starting a bootery to rival her father's own business, Maggie embodies the principles of British capitalism better than even her lackadaisical father. She insists, "Will Mossop is a good man, as meek and fine as I'm strong and hard."
In commiserating with Maggie's ambition and dynamism, Hobson's Choice has remained fresh----a bona fide portrait of British manners that's been relevant over decades of political change and comedic fashion. To contemporary viewers, Maggie may even suggest a proto----Margaret Thatcher entrepreneur. Maggie's drive toward privatization as she rescues Will from drudgery impresses on several levels. She tells him, "You're a business idea in the shape of a man." As they escape his dull marital prospects and his certainty of financial and spiritual impoverishment, Will exclaims, "It's like a happy dream!" This doesn't cast Lean as conservative----look how he provocatively stages Will's admission: the lovers are poised in a narrow archway, the sunlit background of housing projects and satanic mills suggesting their indeterminate future.
Images just that expressive and precise prove Lean's mastery; it's the personal touch----like Will's boot-making expertise----apparent in whatever genre he essays. Celebrated as a "perfectionist," Lean shows an exacting, superb craft in visualizing a scene, staging characters and situations to bring out larger meaning. The first, high-angle shot looking down on Will in his cellar workroom cuts off the top of his head as the camera moves in----but not too close. It matches the scene where Will is angrily summoned by Henry, who is viewed from a low angle----not too close but leaving Henry's head cut off as well. These compositions analyze the prospects of masculine authority and subjugation, both on the verge of change.
Lean's imagery always catches his actors' precision, and never more so than in this film. The camera tracks De Banzie's fastidious ardor; a close-up shows her first sign of affection when she excuses Will's semi-illiteracy: "It's the italics which makes it difficult for him." Laughton's Henry Hobson is an uproarious comic turn, from the moment he runs up a staircase with Lean's vertiginous angle conveying comical tipsiness to the singular midnight caprice when he drunkenly stalks the moon's reflection in the rain puddles. He evokes a Chaplin ballet, but he's actually an existential acrobat. Hobson's moods are larger-than-life theatrical, yet Lean's style makes them quintessentially cinematic. when he finally falls into a cellar, it's as if descending from the moon above. This phantasmagorical image is the link between Lean's professed fondness for Orson Welles's chiaroscuro and Laughton's fantastical The Night of the Hunter.
Folksy humor might conceal the rigor of Lean's formal artistry in Hobson's Choice, but the illustration of English social custom and sexual manners makes it as profoundly expressive as Lean's bigger movies. The opening pan of assorted shoe silhouettes, a range of family sizes, introduces the Hobson family turmoil. It then coheres with Maggie and Will's courtship, their gradual steps taken against neorealist backdrops of northern England's smokestacks and polluted rivers. Altogether, a typically Lean-rich vision of man in his environment. Through this story of thunderously, wondrously henpecked men and a determined woman's romantic zeal, Hobson's Choice depicts private and social revolution. As the bedroom door closes on Maggie and Will's wedding night, Lean transcends smirky innuendo; his slow pan left enlarges the tale, describing a house being put in order: No other romantic comedy has been more telling yet discreet. 精彩的大女自嫁和小鞋匠逆袭。
鳏居的老父亲带着三个女儿，经营着一家鞋店，估计有个几十年了，日子过得其实还不错，只是随着女儿们逐渐长大，老父亲却越来越“游手好闲”，几乎变成了甩手掌柜。
大女儿充当了母亲的角色，打理鞋店，照顾家人，30岁了，老父亲的想法是打发两个小女儿出嫁，而大女儿就留在家里吧，唉，换作老母亲估计就不这么想了。
父亲不给自己做主，甚至嘲笑她已经过了嫁人的年龄。大女儿开始自嫁，目标是店里手艺出色的鞋匠Willy，他做的boot征服了挑剔的贵族老妇，寻遍整个曼彻斯特，唯独Willy的手艺最让她满意，说以后自己和女儿的boot都由小鞋匠来做，小鞋匠有啥变动一定要告知她，不能失联。这个小插曲更是坚定了大女儿的选择，小鞋匠是个treasure，必须抓住，于是就有了后面一系列的协商和谈判。
先是与鞋匠商量，告诉他，我看上你了，you are my man，my brain and your hands will make a working partnership, 约他出去逛公园，目的是昭告天下，基本不识字但诚实的小鞋匠哆哆嗦嗦接受了大女儿的邀请，但告诉她自己并不爱她，大女儿的回答是we can get along even without love, 可最尴尬的是还有另一个女人，什么？赶紧退掉！于是就有了贫民窟那一出交涉或明抢(daylight robery)，这一出实在精彩，那个坏脾气的前丈母娘再也不可能对小鞋匠发火了，因为他再也不用回到那里了，那是他做梦都想离开的地方...
之后与老父亲摊牌，精明又粗心的老父亲万万没想到，大女儿选择的是店里的鞋匠，想收买鞋匠，恐吓他，让他放弃大女儿，但最后却是两人一起离开了他的鞋店，其实小鞋匠当时真是强装硬挺着，刚走出店门人就软得趴下了...
接着贷款开店，老父亲估计两人会重新回头投靠他，但有心的大女儿早就有了计划，二人拿着贵族老妇的名片，上门求助，借资一百英磅，年利20%，于是有了启动资金，二人迅速租房迅速开店，架子车上满满的货，也是满满的希望，只是车子太沉，小鞋匠都压不住了，看着挂起的店招牌Willian Mossip's Shop，小鞋匠都不敢相信自己竟然有店了...
最后圆满成婚，有了自己的店，还要有个名正言顺的家，大女儿回到老父亲的店里为自己买了个黄铜戒指，同时告知两个妹妹自己要结婚了，请她们来参加婚礼，毕竟是一家人，两个妹妹和妹夫都来捧场见证了姐姐的婚礼，更是见识了今非昔比的小鞋匠，经过调教的小鞋匠口齿流利言辞得体，这个大姐夫其实并不逊色！
柔软的内心深处，大女儿也是要面子的，当然更渴望真爱。进入市政厅成婚之前，叮嘱小鞋匠，牧师问你爱不爱我时，你可以如实说或者沉默，而此时小鞋匠的答案是YES，而且是truly said because you are growing on me，这句应该最贴心了，也是大女儿最期待的，当然也是人人向往的美满...
再最后与老父亲合伙，没有了大女儿的操持，老父亲的吃穿用度都没有那么舒服了，整天酗酒导致身体不好，最后生病了。老头尽管倔强，还是不得不放手让大女儿夫妻俩接管老店，小鞋匠开出条件，重新命名，老头拿分成，但不能干涉店务，呵呵，小鞋匠升级成老板了，by gum！这是什么口头禅？
贯穿整个片子，是大女儿的主见和小鞋匠的转变，二人联手，大女儿贤惠持家，精明但不霸道，小鞋匠也没有成为“妻管严”，而是在大女儿的教诲下不断学习和成长起来，最后，心里有数的小鞋匠可以主动去还贵妇欠款，可以坚持将岳父的老店冠上自己的大名，所有这些其实已经超出了大女儿的预期，yes, there is always room at the top ! 这位小鞋匠真是演活了！
看着50年代的英国人，他们的生活颇像我们的80-90年代。人们穿着假领子，戴上假袖头，外罩西服，成了绅士，记得小时候也见人有过这样的假领子，呵呵。