My Favorite Five Movies

I would like to present my five favorite movies for the Newsletter this month.

Number one on my list has always been “Dr. Zhivago”.
The stars include: Omar Shariff, Geraldine Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin’s daughter), Julie
Christie, Rod Steiger, and Tom Courtney.
I loved the sweeping panorama of the Russian Revolution that the movie proclaimed.
As well, Omar Shariff played the part of a Russian poet (taken from Boris Pasternak’s
life)and I really identified with it.
The favorite scene I thought was when Omar Shariff (Yuri Zhivago) was taken away
from his normal life and was given over to the Bolsheviks and made to administer
medicine to the sick for them. Julie Christie (Lara) played a nurse, who having met
Zhivago as a young girl, now becomes attracted to him and they fall in love and she
becomes his mistress.
I wouldn’t have changed anything about the movie.
The ending was sad as Zhivago dies in the middle of the street after getting off a bus
where he thinks he spots Lara walking down the street.



Second all-time favorite for me was “Gone With The Wind”.
This starred Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable.
Again, the sweeping panorama of the Civil War in the Southern States was masterfully
done. It is an older movie, young for Hollywood, and still stands up as a classic.
I loved Vivian Leigh’s character that was taken from a Margrett Mitchell novel as
it showed her life during hard times at war through poverty and strife.
Again, the ending was sad when Vivian Leigh (Scarlett O’Hara) says with her last
words: “Tomorrow is always another day”. She has lost Clark Gable (Rhett Butler)
and must accept her fate.
It touched me with the tragedy of war being foremost in the movie.

My third all-time favorite was “Titanic”.
“Titanic” is a relatively new movie and it was cleverly portrayed in a blockbuster
way. The way the director produced the film, (James Cameron), the main woman
character was portrayed as an older woman who had survived the “Unsinkable” Titanic.
She looks back and tells her story to a wreckage crew in the present day. As the scenes
unfold, Kate Winslett and Leonardo DiCaprio are taken back in space and time that
is exquisitely produced on a make-believe model of the “Titanic”.
I wouldn’t have changed the ending. It was well-done with the main character finding
out that she was surviving the shock of almost near death, and the tragedy of the
boy, Jack Dawson’s death, her lover she meets on the “Titanic”. It was very moving.

The fourth movie I loved for a different reason. The name of the movie is “The
Mothman Prophecies” and it stars Richard Gere and Debra Messing with Alan Bates
as a small part.
The movie was filmed in my grandmother’s hometown of Kittaning, Pennsylvania, and
is shot in the area where she lived where the large homes resembled the one she had
when I was a child. I could really identify with this movie.
“The Mothman Prophecies” is a paranormal psycholgical scientific thriller which takes
a peek at unusual pyschic activity.
Gere’s wife dies in it soon after the movie starts in a car accident and he investigates
this afterward.
I wouldn’t change anything about the movie, I loved the clever schematic climax at
the end.

The last favorite movie I have chosen here is a movie I first saw at a young age. It was
a film I watched on TV and is a British film.
The name of the movie is “A Touch Of Honey” and stars Rita Tushingham.
I loved the movie for its look at young love and it was a peek at teen illegitimacy for
a pregnant young mother and gives us a real societal statement. It was a sixties
film and proved to be part of the sign of the times.
I think this movie would hold up to any bittersweet counterpart today. It was done
in black and white and I liked it that way.
Rita Tushingham’s character touched me, the naive frightened teen, in a place and
time I thought was unmistakably good acting. A good statement on love.