Bright Wall/Dark Room

A different lens on films since 2009. Born and raised on tumblr, grew up to be an online movie magazine.

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" Truth—remember when that mattered? Try, if you can, to recall the newspaper in your hand, the bleeding ink on your fingers, the weight of it, as physically dense as the words impactful. Truth was once something you could run your hand over. It was once a “J” on copy paper, then a newspaper story, a book, a film. Sensory experiences gave Watergate dimensionality and hooked a nation in its ubiquitousness. Silence, then rapturous sound. Twins, these two—sound and silence—for their merging makes music, denotes danger, tells stories. All the President’s Men tells the story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting, but it also tells the story, incidentally, of the loss of form—the texture of news that made it real. Not in its runtime but in its aftertaste, 50 years later, when facts feel more like memories, orderless and shadowed; fantasy in the eye of the beholder. Manipulable in its lack of physicality, the truth that once set us free now hangs like a threat over a nation lacking tools to recognize or comprehend it."

— Lindsey Romain, on All the President's Men

[filmgifs]

I never asked about Watergate. I simply asked what were Hunt’s duties at the White House. They volunteered he was innocent when nobody asked if he was guilty. 

All the President's Men (1976) dir. Alan J. Pakula

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Film is My Absolute Obsession: On Tony Stella

If you’re lucky enough in this life, you’ll have a chance to cross paths with a legend or two, and if you’re even luckier, you’ll get to meet one who’s not only a master of their craft, but also a genuinely kind and humble person, full of integrity and humor and spirit, with a fan’s passion and obsession that matches or exceeds your own—someone still so deeply in touch with the love and joy at the center of what they do that it can’t help but make you love their work, and them, even more. 

That’s what it was like getting a chance to work with Tony Stella, a true artistic genius whose greatest talent—among the many he possessed—was his crystalline ability to create lovingly hand-made paintings and illustrations that captured the very essence of his subjects, distilling an entire film into a single image or two, locating its beating heart with his distinctive, unmistakable style. For a few years, we were lucky enough to regularly commission him to create artwork for Bright Wall/Dark Room, and will forever be honored that some small part of his prodigious artistic output forever graces this site. 

It feels incredibly sad and surreal to be writing about Tony in the past tense though, because he was so full of life almost every time we talked, whether it was about an upcoming issue, movies, art, parenting, Michael Jordan, or most anything he had a particular fondness for. His social media feeds were filled to the brim—day after day, year after year—with a deep love and appreciation for all kinds of movies and posters and artists. When I first reached out to him years ago to discuss collaborating, he responded quickly and excitedly: film is my absolute obsession.

Even if you didn’t know Tony well outside of his work—and I won’t pretend I did—if you were passionate about movies, he always felt like a friend, a fellow obsessive, someone who devoted so much of his time on earth to creating beautiful things to put back into a world that so sorely needed them. Tony was a true believer in the church of cinema, frequently offering encouraging words or fist bump emojis to his fellow congregants, which is surely part of why it felt so heartbreaking to lose him earlier this week, well before his time, when he still had so much life left to live and so much art left to create. Losing someone so vital to the film world, and so revered by so many of us, leaves a deep and lonely space behind where so much art, passion, and joy used to be.

Even though we haven’t worked with him in a few years now, we’re all incredibly sad that Tony is no longer with us, and our hearts go out to his family and friends during this awful time. The world won’t be the same without him in it, but his spirit, integrity, and passionate love of movies lives on through all the beautiful work he left behind. Rest in peace, Tony, and thank you for everything.

Chad Perman, Founder/Editor-in-Chief

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I'm Not Me: On Twin Peaks, Possession, and Vertigo

On doubles, haunted spaces, memory, and grief in Twin Peaks, Possession, and Vertigo.

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"David Lynch’s Wild at Heart opens with fire. We never see its main characters, Sailor and Lula, fall in love. We don’t see the blissful beginning of their relationship—the beautiful warped time that comes with the early stages of obsessively losing yourself in someone else. We meet them, instead, in a moment of crisis that will reshape the landscape of their love, ensuring that every ensuing breath they take together is perfumed with the cloying scent of nostalgia.

Like nearly everything Lynch has created, Wild at Heart haunts the space after the idyllic 1950s American suburban dream was proven corrupt, but outside of an ability to not at least secretly long for some shred of that back. It makes sense, then, that the main character (Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley) models himself (or perhaps, unconsciously, is modeled by the invisible hand of the filmmaker) after Elvis. Elvis, the perfectly imperfect symbol of American youth in the ‘50s, who inhabited impossible paradoxes: sexual threat and Southern mama’s boy; white American Army boy and vessel of Black rhythm; carefree, innocent, laughably formulaic movie star and deeply troubled drug addict spiraling out of control. 

What do you do when the world you live in has thrown you more than you can carry? You put on a show. You wear something gold. You retreat into fantasy. You dream."

When Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the booing from the audience mingled with the cheers. David Lynch stood onstage, listening to the jeers, smiling. “It’s a true—a dream come true,” he said. Dreams, in Lynch’s world, do often come true, tinted though they may be with shades of terror.   

The film wasn’t well received when it came out, garnering its share of negative reviews from critics, who questioned Wild at Heart’s “repulsive and manipulative” nature, called it “disjointed” and “empty,” and wondered whether there was any meaning behind the violence other than shock value and absurdity.1 I’ll admit, it’s not my favorite Lynch film, but it also holds a sort of irresistible sway over me. Years ago, somehow, my then-boyfriend/now-husband Chris and I caught the final scene of Wild at Heart on television. The image of Nicolas Cage singing “Love Me Tender” to Laura Dern on top of a car while she punctuates his crooning with mannered exclamations—“Sailor!”—was instantly compelling. The scene pulses with a magnetism and an unreal elevation of human connection that is hard to resist. Even now, watching it, I can feel its magic. The credits that scroll over the couple for the duration of the song only somehow help it mean more—it’s that exclusively Lynchian ability to call out artifice while also injecting the artifice with something that feels real. We talked about playing that scene at our wedding, but determined, ultimately, that the confusion and reaction of our parents would not be worth it.2 If you’re looking for a fantasy of true love, though, I’d choose Sailor and Lula over the stereotypical wedding cake couple in their tuxedo and long white dress any day.

When we meet Sailor, he’s being threatened in the lobby of what looks to be an upscale theater of some kind in Cape Fear by a hired killer with a knife. Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” plays softly in the background. Within 30 seconds, Sailor is pummeling the man on the staircase—slamming him into the wall and bashing his head on the banister and the floor until it breaks open—as Powermad’s “Slaughterhouse” kicks in and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern) screams. The violence is abrupt, extreme, and near-cartoonish. Nicolas Cage radiates uncontrolled emotion. Laura Dern is, as she will be again in Lynch’s universe, a distorted and complicated Woman In Trouble. 

If quick world-building is usually key to audience buy-in, rapid-fire world-building like this may actually have the opposite effect. Lynch piles on his signature moves relentlessly: the angled shot of the ceiling, canted just enough to destabilize the viewer; the close-ups on distorted facial expressions; the caricature of the possibly insane mother (in Twin Peaks, Grace Zabriskie’s unsettling Sarah Palmer—here, Diane Ladd’s much more unquestionably evil Marietta Fortune); the over-the-top violence executed with glee; the actors who have clearly been made to understand that their roles are simultaneously serious and farcical—commedia dell’arte-adjacent. You’d be forgiven for bailing after the first three minutes if this sort of thing just isn’t for you. You’d also be forgiven for wanting more. 

*

There is something about porous boundaries that compels me. It’s what draws me to horror, to the surreal, to the distorted. There is also something about porous boundaries that, obviously, compels David Lynch. I am far from the first person to make this observation (there is a whole entire book, for example, called David Lynch: Blurred Boundaries); his oeuvre is full of characters who slide between selves, between dimensions, between realities, between the seconds. He prefers curtains to walls, water to stone; even when there are hard barriers between characters and something they want, Lynch makes sure to leave holes and slats in those barriers. His catalog of work is full of penetrable surfaces, pervious lives. 

The music he is drawn to, too, echoes this interest in liminality. He often picks music that encourages a sort of nostalgic slippage—either because it is laid down in juxtaposition with a scene that feels tonally and chronologically separate from the track, or because the song itself is layered with the construction and desires of something it can no longer truly be. In Wild at Heart, the soundtrack veers from Romantic-era classical to speed metal, all of it quite loud,3 creating a soundscape that destabilizes even as it constantly asks the viewer to access emotions they aren’t necessarily prepared to access. In an iconic scene painted heavily with black comedy, Lula attempts to find something to listen to on the radio as she and Sailor road-trip west from North Carolina to Texas, fleeing the forces that are attempting to separate them (her mother, his parole officer, life itself). She flips channels, hearing blips of increasingly absurd and surreally upsetting news stories (“shot and killed her three children”—“heinous”—“Roy had had sex with the corpse”—“released 500 turtles into the Ganges to try and reduce human pollution, and now plan to put in the crocodiles to devour floating corpses”). “Holy shit!” she screams, and pulls over (“I never heard so much SHIT in all my life”), yelling at Sailor to find some music on the radio “THIS INstant, I MEAN it!” Out of the car now, they scream and kick as Powermad blares over the radio, thrashing their bodies as the dust rises around them.4

Suddenly, though, they embrace, and Richard Strauss’s “Im Abendrot” swells around them. The sun is setting. The landscape—tinted sepia in the evening light—arches delicately, imitating the curve of the earth. We ease into the music to slip, with Sailor and Lula, from aching horror to fantastical beauty.

It’s a tricky thing, to blend highly stylized artifice with real emotion, and perhaps Wild at Heart doesn’t always get it right. The attempt, though, is pure rock ‘n roll: a performance manipulated to draw out screams, an outfit calculated to elicit swoons, a persona dreamed up as a façade to protect something scared and vulnerable deep inside. 

In his acceptance speech for the 1970 Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Nation Award, Elvis (borrowing from the old Vincent Youmans song “Without a Song”) spoke with his publicly characteristic innocence and seriousness:  

When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times…I learned very early in life that: “Without a song, the day would never end; without a song, a man ain’t got a friend; without a song, the road would never bend—without a song.” So I keep singing a song. Good night. Thank you. 

So I keep singing a song.5 The tragic simplicity of this worldview is heightened by the knowledge that singing a song is not and has never been enough. It would not be enough for Elvis. It was not enough for Kurt Cobain, or Karen Carpenter, or Jim Morrison. It was not enough for Judy Garland. Nevertheless, they kept singing up until the end—through the pain and on top of the pain. Lynch himself continues to believe in the power song holds in the midst of tragedy and crisis, whether that song comes from the exceedingly strange Lady in the Radiator, any number of intent performers at Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse, a captivating Rebekah Del Rio in the impossible dream of Club Silencio, or a mesmerizing Dean Stockwell lip-syncing into a lightbulb. 

In Lynch’s films, song acts the way it acts on people in advanced stages of dementia: it tugs on a cord that is still there, somehow, even if the bell it was once connected to has gone silent. It allows for momentary lucidity in an otherwise clouded and chaotic realm. It bleeds through the barrier between transcendent meaning and restrictively painful reality. 

*

Trauma, of course, does the opposite: it reinforces that wall to a terrifying degree, making it hard for survivors to operate with any degree of hope. Wild at Heart, like so much of Lynch’s work, lives and breathes in a post-traumatic space; “Uncle Pooch’s” rape of 13-year-old Lula haunts the film, as does the question of her father’s perpetration of violence (sexual or otherwise) on both her and her mother. Lula navigates various triggers throughout the film that appear to call up her past experiences, chief among them her upsetting encounter with Bobby Peru (a very disturbing Willem Dafoe) in her motel room.6 But I thought you said this movie was about youthful dreams of freedom?! Sure. The thing about youthful dreams, you see, is that you can’t actually have them when you’re young. “Youthful dreams” only begin to materialize when you’ve experienced enough of the worst parts of life to know that, at some undefined moment in the past, you were better off. 

Interestingly, though Sailor’s outsized and horrifying act of violence kicks off the film’s action, and would seem to be something that could re-traumatize a survivor, Lula’s trust in him is always rewarded. It’s one of the things that makes their relationship so beautiful—she talks shamelessly to him about her rape, about the pain in her past that has shaped her, and he hears her and sees her and receives her so openly that it doesn’t feel strange or upsetting for them to move fluidly from the remembering of sexual pain to a shared experience of sexual bliss. 

It’s this insistent strain of attempting to navigate a world that has been broken in half for you at a young age that (purposefully) sours some of the film—and also allows for Lynch’s Wizard of Oz imagery to enter into the world of the movie, a campy palimpsest of possibility. While interpretations of the original The Wizard of Oz may vary (hidden meanings range from a political allegory about populism and the gold standard to a Pilgrim’s Progress-esque allegory of Christian faith), there’s no question that the film is haunted by its own cast and lore and conspiracies. The character of Dorothy seems inseparable from the troubled Judy Garland, who was asked from a young age to change her appearance and diet, permanently undermining her self-confidence, and prescribed drugs to keep up with the pace of the film contract she labored under in her teens. As a child, she endured multiple separations and reunifications between her parents, whose marriage was imperiled by persistent rumors of her father’s affairs with men; her mother controlled her career and behavior from a very young age, and Garland herself called her mother “the real Wicked Witch of the West.” This seems to take on extra significance when we remember that it is Lula’s mother who inhabits the Wicked Witch role in Wild at Heart, seemingly both jealous of her daughter’s freedom and relationships and broken—perhaps by her own traumas—in a way that makes her believe that controlling Lula is the key to her own happiness and fulfillment.7

In The Wizard of Oz, of course, Dorothy slips from her sepia-toned Kansas farm to a technicolor city built on lies and manipulated vision, where she encounters nearly inhuman deviations of various people in her life. A dream world? Yes, one that is undeniably disturbing, yet punctuated by hopeful interludes of song. (Sound familiar?) One wonders, was it just the blunt force trauma to her head during a hurricane that initiated this slide into fantasy? Or was there something else there—some deeper trauma that Dorothy was attempting to process through her color-saturated reveries? 

The imagery that Lynch weaves into Wild at Heart is certainly not reassuring at first, entering largely through the insane Marietta Fortune, who bears the weight of Lynch’s need for a proxy-of-evil character. The scene where she paints her face and arms with lipstick and then calls her private detective lover Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) just to repeatedly tell him she’s not going to tell him what she’s about to do, ask him to meet her at a restaurant to “fix it up,” and then hangs up in order to vomit is—for lack of a better term—fucking terrifying. Lula finally defeats her by throwing water on a photograph of her, symbolically melting away the last tie that Lula had to her traumatic childhood. You can almost hear Ladd screaming, “Oh, what a world, what a world!” 

*

I don’t know where I stand on interpreting the end sequence, which is either unfolding in the characters’ reality or some sort of twisted, utopic Jacob’s Ladder moment-of-dying fantasia. The facts are: Sailor, upon being released from prison once again—this time for a bank robbery planned with Bobby Peru that turned out to be a set-up for his own murder—tells a heartbroken Lula that he cannot reunite with her and their now young son because he will only make their lives worse. Walking away from the prison, alone, parallel to the double yellow line in the strangely deserted road, Sailor is inexplicably surrounded by a gang of men who attack him. They leave him lying in the road, and then something happens. Their shadows disappear. A pink globe apparates in the sky, revealing none other than Glinda the Good Witch, played by a radiant Sheryl Lee. “Sailor,” she intones, hovering above the ground. “Don’t be afraid, Sailor…If you’re truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams. Don’t turn away from love, Sailor,” she pleads with him. “Don’t turn away from love.” 

Is this vision real? Is it just a blackout-induced mirage? Is it the stuff that comes before death, a portal into another world? Is the subsequent serenade and reunion between Sailor and Lula real? I don’t know. I don’t know what I think. What I want to think is that yes, love is still possible in this torn-up, burned-up thing we call life. I want to think that there is transcendence, that there is connection—that there is a possible road to healing after trauma, that song can save us, that we do have individuality and freedom despite the prisons the world tries to put us in, that there is something stronger than evil and it wears a snakeskin jacket (perhaps as a symbol, as it proclaims, or perhaps as a protective shell against the horrors of this planet). I want to think that the youthful rock ‘n roll spirit of Sailor and Lula is something that doesn’t die with age or experience—that nostalgic dreams, while still dreams, can act on people, not just preserve something unreachable in amber. I want to think that the road leads somewhere. I want to think that there is something behind the curtain, be it in Oz or in the Red Room. I want to live in a world that lets me slip between the cracks and emerge somewhere beautiful. 

Love me tender, love me true / All my dreams fulfilled, Sailor sings. And isn’t that just it?

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Fix Your Heart or Die: The Startling Empathy of David Lynch

The films of David Lynch are strange creatures, but to focus only on their most ungainly appendages is to willfully ignore their equally bea

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"Critics of Wes Anderson love to draw attention to his fastidious production design, fetishizing the lives of the rich and unfeeling, their upper-class ennui subject for melancholy farce. Though always infused with a touch of absurdity, these lives are in no way enviable. They are stilted and suffering, and only through hyper-stylization are their plights remotely watchable. Where Asteroid City shines, where it is made masterpiece, is in its brief flashes of joy: a good picture, a milkshake, a song and dance, one more martini. Here is a life not perfect—soldiers wielding guns, no personal space, endless boredom—made enviable by one thing only: each other."

- Fran Hoepfner, To the Stars

(art by Brianna Ashby)

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Trans Cinema (Issue #120): Letter from the Guest Editor

Amidst the grand, never-ceasing chaos, this issue seeks to mine the complicated joy of trans existence, balancing both the dark corners of o

"I love cinema with my entire being. In the past years especially, retreating to the darkened room of my apartment has been a crucial antidote to the amplified cultural noise of transphobia that continues to blare loudly from the void of my phone. As a trans woman, my relationship to the screen has always been marked by the tenuous acknowledgment that, for as much as I love the medium, the medium seldom reflects—at least in a mainstream sense—that love back to me. The recent crop of contemporary, studio-released examples of capital “T” trans cinema leave much to be desired—namely, actual trans people—and rarely have they ever translated the experience of transness, and all the possible nebulous arrangements that word implies, in a way that has felt true or meaningful.

As such, I’ve turned my starved attention to other, less pronounced creases and corners of films that don’t explicitly name their goals as conjuring a Trans Experience. Rather, films like Pina or Altered States, project a kind of residual transness that goes unspoken, but leaves deep impressions in the skin. Many films I’ve come to appreciate and cherish, like the two I’ve just named, illuminate a kind of dysphoric motion that is instantly recognizable as trans. The body is a plaything, a curation, a space for manifold possibility and reinvention. The essays in this issue, then, are not universally concerned with the Trans Figure at the center of a film. Instead, our writers attend to the edges and margins where transness exists as undisturbed and unpolluted by cisgendered perceptions. Across this issue, films that might not scream “Trans” nonetheless hold ideas of transness close, investigating many of the endless contours and arrangements of trans livelihood, marked by beauty, tragedy, comedy, and visions of the future.

Here, we have such gems as S. Brook Corfman’s exemplary essay on Yentl, which attends to the face as a site for various gendered considerations. Elsewhere, Caden Mark Gardner locates examples of trans masculinity in John Waters’ iconic, underseen Desperate Living, while Willow Maclay considers the persona swap film as inherently trans, as evidenced by her examination of the films Celine and Julie Go Boating and Desperately Seeking Susan. Zefyr Lisowksi marvelously wraps Black Swan in a devastating personal narrative about trans desire and survival, and Weston Richey poetically explores the liberatory meaninglessness of transness in Orlando. And to round things out, we have dynamic essays on such films as My Cousin Vinny by Aegor Ray, By Hook or By Crook by Jo Barchi, and a double feature of Junior and Titane by Luke Sutherland. 

To live as trans in the present is to be thrust into a precarious choreography with the law, the invasive, wandering eyes of the cis-public, and dehumanizing institutions that would rather see us snuffed out than thriving. And still, amidst this grand, never-ceasing chaos, this issue seeks to mine the complicated joy of trans existence, balancing both the dark corners of our lives with many brilliant cracks of light, and doing so fearlessly and effortlessly.

Thank you for taking the time to read these words.

Sincerely,

Spencer

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The latest episode of our monthly podcast is now available! This month, Veronica and Chad are joined by special guest Karina Wolf to discuss Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

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A good movie makes you want to rewatch it for sheer entertainment. A great movie makes you want to revisit it because it recharges some basic part of you that may be running low.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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The End of the End: An Evolution of Faith, in Five Films - Bright Wall/Dark Room

Jenny Hollowell on growing up Jehovah's Witness and escaping through the movies.

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On Elvis (2022):

"Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a movie to which all superlatives apply: a tour de force, a masterpiece, a work of art, a singular achievement in filmmaking. The challenge of encapsulating Elvis Presley’s life in a single film is no easy task, and the result is somehow a biopic, a musical, a concert film, and a Greek tragedy all rolled into one—a paean to the American dream that isn’t afraid to explore its darker underbelly."

- Calvin McMillin, We Can Be Heroes

(art by Tom Ralston)

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"On its surface, Skate Kitchen appears to be no more than a standard, naturalistic indie coming-of-age film about a girl finding her rightful place through friends who share her fervent love for skating. But there’s a subtextual narrative beneath the film’s loose structure: a freeform exploration of identity and belonging. It’s a narrative that becomes instrumental to how I find myself engaging with the film time and time again—in the process of grasping what my gender identity even is, eventually finding certainty in myself, and discovering the people who make me feel seen as I wanted to be seen. 

Each time I revisit Skate Kitchen, Camille’s arc toward self-expression and community becomes clearer in even the most minute details, with Crystal Moselle’s knack for letting small, organic moments speak to what her film says about the intersections of gender, companionship, and skateboarding."

- Natalie Marlin, The Skater’s Guide to Girlhood 

(art by Tom Ralston)

[laurbailey]

BLUE VALENTINE (2010) dir. Derek Cianfrance (insp)

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A Grand Yuletide Theory: The Muppet Christmas Carol is the Best Adaptation of A Christmas Carol:

“It’s hard to begrudge those who give that title to the 1951 adaptation directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, which has a delightful performance from Alastair Sim that has justifiably become the standard against which all Scrooges are judged, gothic atmosphere you could drown in, and spine-chilling effects by 1951 standards. That is an unquestionably great movie based on A Christmas Carol.

What that movie does not do is identify and synthesize the specific cocktail that makes Charles Dickens’ novel a universally enduring work of fiction. The same is true of the 1935 version starring Seymour Hicks, the 1938 version starring Reginald Owens, the 1984 version starring George C. Scott, the 1999 version starring Patrick Stewart—and, of course, the 2009 version starring Jim Carrey, though if anyone is tempted to make that case I can only hope the Ghosts of Good Movies Past, Present, and Yet to Come might save their soul.

No, only one work of cinema has ever managed to effectively recreate that uniquely Dickens magic, achieving it not so much through adaptation in the traditional sense as through the more precarious feat of transmutation.”

[emmanuelleriva]

Design for Living (1933) dir. Ernst Lubitsch

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“Hepburn and Grant tumble toward happy endings through chaos and adventure, misunderstandings and trickery, all with an effortless grace.”

- Julia Sirmons, Perfect Playmates: Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant