loneliness of the long distance runner - girl with the green eyes - lolita

I didn't go to bed until about 4.30am last night, and surprisingly, l was awake again at about 9.30am this morning (even after the FPO had woken me up earlier in the morning), so l read the Sunday paper to catch up on news and got up and watched some films (it's a hard life).

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is from 1962 and stars Tom Courteney as Colin Smith, the anti hero. He gets arrested and put into a borstal, where they discover he is the best long distance runner, so the governor starts to trust him and give him more freedom, in the hope he will win the challenge race against the public school boys. Ultimately, Colin hates the establishment, and although everyone thinks that he has become the governor's pet, he throws the race right at the end, sacrificing glory and a possible early release, to demonstrate that it is all meaningless and he rejects society's values. It is an excellent film (based on the also excellent 1959 book by Alan Sillitoe). Although it is pretty dated, (with a young James Bolam and a supposedly Liverpudlian John Thaw), it is up there as one of my favourite films.

The Girl With The Green Eyes (1964) stars Rita Tushingham as Kate Brady, an innocent farm girl who moves to Dublin and shares a place with her best friend Baba Brennan, who both fall for a middle aged married writer, but he ends up falling for Kate. Also very dated but not too good, didn't manage to watch it till the end, as l got bored after about an hour. I was curious about the film as it is by Edna O'Brien, and l am reading her 'A Pagan Place' (amongst other things) at the moment. Mind you, l may give up on that as well, as it's not exactly gripping.

Talking of gripping (what a link!), that's what Jeremy Irons (as Humbert Humbert) was doing to his stepdaughter in the 1997 remake of Vladimir Nobokov's Lolita. I have read the book and seen the earlier (1962) film by Stanley Kubrick (starring James Mason), but l still managed to forget some of the plot. When Humbert is driving away at the start with a gun and blood on him, l assumed he had killed the stepdaughters husband, but it was his doppelgänger Clare Quilty. My memory is rubbish. I also forgot the reason Humbert gives for falling in love with a child (his childhood sweetheart dies young, and he had been looking for a replacement ever since). I do however, remember the book being darker, and Humbert being a lot crueller. Also in the book, Lolita is 12, but seems to be slightly older in this film. There was a lot of controversy before this film was released, and l do think it romanticises the relationship too much, but they both die at the end, so the moralists should have been kept happy and cut down on their complaining. I still prefer the James Mason version (also starring Peter Sellers!), and may even get round to reading the book again one of these days.

Right, off for a coffee.

toodle pip