Good afternoon everyone,

I realised last night that I've been engaged in a project for the last 18 months that I haven't told you anything about! Or if I did tell you, it wasn't in Fem Fri. For the last 18 months I've been watching a film a week for every year since 1944. It's been amazing and I thought this week I'd share with you some of the films I've watched and the women who have starred in and written them.

Brief Encounter (1945) was really early in the project and was immediately one of my favourite films. It's maybe the most British thing I have ever seen, an absolute masterpiece of repressed emotion. You would love it. Celia Johnson, who starred, wrote a lot of very sweet letters to her husband when he was away at the Second World War – there is a stage show about them, Posting Letters to the Moon – and you can read a bit of one of the letters here:

“There is a fair amount of quiet din, going on in the distance. I think they must be rumbling up the tanks. I saw a mass of these monsters parked along the woods near Joyce Grove. One, roughly the size of the Albert Hall was rather charmingly named Cupid. I don’t know why I tell you all about this imitation battle when you know all too much about real ones but at the moment it impinges on our life and it makes a change when walking to the village to see tanks instead of squirrels. I really prefer squirrels but I can visualise a moment when I’d rather see a Cupid.”

— Celia Johnson to Peter Fleming, March 9, 1943

https://www.henleystandard.co.uk/news/theatre/107993/a-brief-encounter-with-celia-s-letters.html

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay. The story of how she wrote the novel was incredible; she dreamed about it in a vivid dream one night, then for a week thereafter the story revealed itself to her in her dreams. So she wrote the novel all night and recorded it all day. Here's a long, good article about the writing of the novel and the journey to the film:

"Did I think the story was true? We did talk about this. But the truth for Joan was different to the rest of us. She was never straightforward about it. I think I decided in the end that it was a great work of the imagination. I see it as a book of place; a painterly book that captures the atmosphere of the Australian bush."

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/the-extraordinary-story-behind-picnic-at-hanging-rock-20170328-gv7upc.html

I sort of assumed I'd already seen Some Like It Hot (1959), then I watched it and found out I'd seen only very short clips. It is, as everyone says, entirely delightful. Approach with caution:

A seemingly innocent movie choice ended in disaster today when you turned on 1959’s Some Like It Hot at your grandmother’s house and discovered that the black-and-white classic is hornier than you could have possibly imagined.

https://reductress.com/post/black-and-white-movie-hornier-than-you-could-have-possibly-imagined/

Have a great weekend!

A xx.