The magic of black and white films

He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a mid-Atlantic accent. The lord is portrayed by Herbert Marshall, a screen idol of the 1930s and 1940s, his wife by Norma Shearer, a Hollywood superstar whose eyes alone enslaved men and whose figure caused me sleepless nights as a schoolboy, if you know what I mean. Then there is a suitor, Robert Montgomery, the patrician American heartthrob, who plays a rich drunken playboy who pursues Norma. But he does it with class and elegance, without a trace of toxic masculinity, a modern feminist broadside that didn’t exist among the upper classes back then.

Okay, it’s a movie. But it’s one that kept me up until 3.30 a.m. although I was dead sober and dying with desire for Norma and that twilit nostalgic period. The film is set in London and on the French Riviera, and was shot in a Hollywood studio in 1934.