It is said that when King Xerxes of Persia was on the eve of invading Greece, he wept – not for the bloodshed to come, but on looking at his vast army and reflecting that all these men would be dead in a hundred years. (He was mostly right.)
I got a similar-but-kinda-in-reverse sensation watching The King’s Speech. A historical drama set in a world which is to our own . . . put it this way, if it seemed at all strange and exotic to me, that was more because of the British setting and the palace setting than the 1930s setting. Not all that long ago at all, looked at that way. And yet . . . almost all characters in the story are real historical figures – and all of them are dead now, with the sole exception of the little Princess Elizabeth, now Queen and 85. Even her younger sister Margaret is dead. (And when George VI was crowned in 1937 (American newsreel of the event here), the British Empire was not just a quaint phrase, HM Government actually ruled a quarter of the globe.)
Makes you think . . . well, not really, but it does make you feel . . . something . . . about the sweep of time and history.
Perhaps this should go in IMHO or MPSIMS, but it’s about a movie, so, CS.
Not exactly the same thing, since you’re talking about characters and not actors – but I can’t watch the Three Stooges or the Marx Brothers or an old flick like Casablanca, without the thought entering my head that all these people are dead. It is kind of weird, somehow.
George Carlin did a routine on that once, watching an old movie, going, “Let’s see . . . yeah, that guy is dead. Hey, Harry, look! That guy is dead! No, not that guy, but that other guy next to him, he’s gotta be dead now.”
I must have been about 8 years old when I finally got the realization that the actors in the movies I watched on TV sometimes were dead - I was watching Robin Hood and asked my mom if Errol Flynn was going to have any movies coming out because we had been discussing how many of the movies I was watching were actually in color like what we saw at theaters. Up until that point it never occurred to me that the movies were in most cases many years older than I was and the actors did not look the same, or were dead.
Per the OP, I thought it might be possible one of Logue’s three sons might still be alive. The eldest and youngest have both passed, so it seems likely the middle one has, too (though if not, he’d be in his 90s)
It was awhile after watching The King’s Speech that I had the head-slapping realization that Helena Bonham Carter was portraying the Queen Mum. I just didn’t connect the dots while watching the film.
Somewhat ironically, the King died of cancer caused by his smoking, which had been recommended by his doctors. Of course, nearly everyone smoked like forest fires back then.
Reminds me of watching Dad’s Army on its endless repeats in the early 90s. If you’d had a drinking game with a shot for every time a character appeared who was already dead, you would also soon have been dead.
I was watching a documentary about FDR the other day and thinking of how odd that very recently there was a time a president was in a wheelchair (one modified not to look like one in pictures) and the public didn’t know it.
When I was 5 or 6, I went to a kindergarten/preschool called “Papoose Parlor” in Tucker, Georgia, near Atlanta (this would have been 1973-74). At the end of the year, the center threw a party that had actual Laurel and Hardy look-alikes come and do a show for the kids (one of the local TV stations was involved as I remember L&H had WXIA on their jackets).
Well, this offended me, because I was no fool - this wasn’t the real Laurel and Hardy and I was going to make sure that everybody knew it:
“THEY’RE DEAD! DADDY, LAUREL AND HARDY ARE DEAD!”
“hush!”
“NO! THEY’RE DEAD, DADDY!”
I seem to have little memory of the party beyond that. It is likely that I didn’t stay for the end, however.
If you watch This is Spinal Tap with the commentary track on, you’ll hear the actors in-character as members of the band years after the movie was shot. The bass player Derek keeps saying “He’s dead now…she’s dead…” about people on screen. Finally someone else in the band calls him on it, saying he couldn’t possibly know all those people are dead. Derek says he didn’t mean they were literally dead, he was just trying to point out the passage of time.
I watched “The King’s Speech” last night, after watching bits of the Royal Wedding in the morning. It was interesting to see Westminster Abbey decorated for two such different occasions, and some very distinctive red uniforms which gold stripes . . .
I spent the whole first half of the movie thinking Queen Mary was the Queen Mother. They didn’t call her by name (that I noticed) and I just didn’t think through the relationships. At some point, probably when the little girls were on, it hit me. Now I do know who is who.
Why, O Lord, did you have to take him and spare Richard Dawson?!