The scandal surrounding Snow White is small potatoes in cinematic history

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This article was published 13/09/2012 (5131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Is there no worse indignity than Ben Mulroney discussing your love life?

Such is life for actress Kristen Stewart. In a sane world, it would not be newsworthy that a 22-year-old woman would cheat on her boyfriend, or that a married movie director would cheat on his wife. You would have to be a babe in the woods not to assume that kind of thing happens every day.

It was Stewart’s misfortune that news of a brief affair between her and Rupert Sanders, the married director of Snow White and the Huntsman, broke in the era of a voracious 24-hour news cycle. Stewart has never registered as an especially gossip-worthy former child star, along the lines of your Lindsay Lohans and your Britney Spearses. She only became a tabloid fixation because she happened to be dating Robert Pattinson, the actor who played her vampiric boyfriend Edward in The Twilight Saga, making it easy for fans to project the films’ supernatural passions on two attractive flesh-and-blood mortals.

Twilight fans, remember, have supported a lucrative T-shirt market, taking sides between “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob.” Loyalty figures strongly in the Twilight ethos.

That’s unfortunate for Stewart, who must take comfort that this kind of story burns bright and flames out quickly.

One can only assume this will not stay in the public imagination for long. Certainly, it won’t compare to the kind of past Hollywood scandals of yore.

 

Here’s a sampling of illicit star couplings that actually had an impact on the world of cinema:

 

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall

THE nitty-gritty: They worked together on To Have and Have Not in 1944 and love-lightning struck the stoic, married 44-year-old Bogart when confronted by the 19-year-old Bacall. You would understand if you heard Bacall’s reading of the line: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

Why it mattered: Their chemistry was exploited in three subsequent movies, including Key Largo and Dark Passage. But if Bogart and Bacall hadn’t hooked up, cinema might never have had their classic flirtatious encounter in The Big Sleep, discussing horse racing… but not really:

Vivian (Bacall): “Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first, see if they’re front runners or come from behind, find out what their whole card is, what makes them run.”

 

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

THE nitty-gritty: When it comes to sex scandals, it’s hard to top the making of the 1963 release Cleopatra. Elizabeth Taylor was 30 and on her fourth husband — Eddie Fisher — when she met and fell in love with the womanizing Richard Burton on the set of this hugely expensive costume drama for 20th Century Fox.

Both were both married to other people when they fell into a very public affair. The relationship blossomed into a passionate, rip-roaring, on-again/off-again continuing melodrama to rival a soap opera.

Why it mattered: They made a few mediocre movies subsequent to Cleopatra, but Taylor and Burton reteamed most memorably as a shabby, squabbling married couple shaking up the halls of academe in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Mike Nichols’ film of the play by Edward Albee featuring an Oscar-winning turn for Taylor as über-slattern Martha to Burton’s passive-aggressive George.

 

Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini

THE nitty-gritty: Bergman was a bona fide Hollywood romantic lead after playing Humphrey Bogart’s tormented lover in Casablanca, and she was so impressed with the films of Italian neo-realist Roberto Rossellini, she wrote him a fan letter, offering her acting services. They collaborated on a movie, Stromboli (1950), but more importantly, they collaborated on a love affair that would produce a child. In those days, their union was sufficiently outrageous that Bergman was denounced in the Senate by a Colorado senator. She was effectively exiled from Hollywood until 1956, when she returned to do an Oscar-winning turn in the drama Anastasia.

Why it mattered: Bergman made a total of five films before they were divorced, but their most cinematically important collaboration may have been daughter Isabella Rossellini, actress, writer, and muse to the likes of David Lynch and Guy Maddin.

 

Snow White and the Huntsman

(Blu-ray)

SNOW White and the Huntsman is a sporadically interesting film that occasionally enriches the Disney-fied mythology of a beautifully complexioned princess, an evil queen, and their battle for dominance.

But in the greater context of film history, it will be remembered for one reason only.

It is the last film Bob Hoskins made before retiring from the business due to Parkinson’s disease.

The much-discussed affair between director Rupert Sanders and star Kristen Stewart doesn’t rate its own Blu-ray extra and that is just as well. Of far more interest on this disc is Charlize Theron and her performance as Ravenna, the sorceress who seduces and kills the father of Snow White and takes over the kingdom for her own selfish purposes.

Ravenna maintains her youthful beauty in a kind of ritual that owes more to Elizabeth Bathory than Brothers Grimm: If she spots a wrinkle, she sucks the life force from any handy maidens. Likewise, her presence in the kingdom causes poverty and blight in the surrounding villages. Not that she’s apologizing. “I will give this wretched world the queen it deserves,” she says at one point.

When her molten magic mirror suggests Snow White’s heart would give the queen youthful immortality, Snow is obliged to escape the castle and take refuge in the Dark Forest, a place of hallucinogenic horror.

Ravenna enlists the aid of the huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), a drunken widower, to navigate the forest with her creepy albino brother/henchman (Sam Spruell). Soon, both Snow White and the huntsman are on the run, finding themselves in the company of seven dwarves (a smorgasbord of excellent English character actors including the aforementioned Hoskins, Ian McShane, Toby Jones, Ray Winstone and Eddie Marsan, all digitally shrunken). Meanwhile, among the Queen’s men hunting for the fugitive princess is William (Sam Claflin), Snow’s childhood crush.

The movie’s visuals are often quite wonderful, especially in their sumptuous rendering of nature imagery.

Pacing is a problem, however. Director Sanders was recruited from the realm of commercials, and the movie’s 124-minute running time has the kind of lags one might expect from a guy who usually delivers his product 60 seconds at a time. (The Blu-ray’s offering of an even-longer director’s cut doesn’t help matters.)

The other weakness of the movie is Stewart. Her look is wrong: Stewart is lovely enough to contemporary eyes, but she hardly epitomizes the classical kind of beauty the role demands. And in her Henry V moment, when she is obliged to rally villagers against the queen, her emotional pitch is more reminiscent of a teen tantrum. Who’s the fairest of the mall?

Blu-ray extras include elaborate tours of the film’s Pinewood Studio sets, a visual effects breakdown, a doc in which Sanders explains his approach to the story, and four character featurettes on Snow White, Ravenna, the Huntsman and the Dwarves.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca