OldieMovieFan

This little movie was never the kind that would be a blockbuster hit, but on top of that it was produced right in the middle of gigantic worldwide movie events.... Iron Man and Captain America and the Avenger saga... and it vanished like a whisper.

That doesn't change the fact that 'Camilla Dickinson' is a great, great film. Adelaide Clemens gives us a gorgeous example of a personality trait which is almost unknown to the public. It is extremely common for brilliant people to be socially awkward, repressed, introverted, incredibly shy. Indeed they are often seen as a little odd, or eccentric. The hermit next door.

Her father, played to perfection by Cary Elwes, is her role model. He is hyper-intellectual, hyper-driven to success, and has driven his wife to distraction and to love-starved affairs. Camilla too is starved for affection, and when she meets her first love, all that awkwardness comes to the fore. Her brilliant mind is steadily before us too; age fifteen, she's off to one of the great universities of the world.

Set in 1948, 'Camilla Dickinson' moves very much like a love affair from the Golden Age of Hollywood, at a slow tempo, at an adagio, matching the slower pace of life among the wealthy before computers and internets and cell phones accelerated all our lives into an unrecognizable blizzard of technology. But an adagio has a power all its own, a deep musical river with currents of enormous force that can move the listener with melodies that ring on and on in the mind.

A whisper also has a power of its own. It is, after all, the voice of love.

Ginger Rogers made 2 movies with William Boyd, neither of them really great, but 'Carnival Boat' is by far the better of the two and in fact is a really good movie on its own, one of director Albert Rogell's best in a long career of B movies.

The logging scenes are terrific, some of the stunts are amazing, and the runaway train is thrilling even in 2025. Hobart Bosworth is forgotten today but he was a great star in the earliest days of film; he had the lead in the very first movie ever made in Hollywood, a short from 1909 called 'In the Sultan's Power.' The entire film industry had enormous respect and admiration Bosworth and, in an interview decades later as her film career was winding down, Rogers said she had considered it a great honor to play across from him, if only briefly.

Boyd's fight scenes are amatuerish, even for 1932, but he makes up for it with a dynamic screen presence. Ginger's vaudeville act is a lot of fun (watch how she glides to one side of the stage to introduce her chorus line - very professional) and even though she is only onscreen for a few minutes, she dominates all of her scenes, easily matching Boyd and Bosworth as a forceful personality even while 'keeping it light.'

Definitely worth watching 'Carnival Boat'.... just keep in mind that it's an inexpensive film from 1932, not from 2022.

Funny thing about this movie and it's message... if it had been released just a couple of years later, when #metoo movement appeared, it would have been a monster mainstream hit.

It only slightly pre-dates that time, when vast numbers of men all across the country categorically refused to be alone with women in rooms, cars, elevators, offices, or anywhere else, and traditional dating just fell off the map. At first glance, the reasoning of the movie appears to be different from the reasoning behind #metoo but actually the logic is identical; only the perspective is different.

The difference in cultures that looked so stark, suddenly, for a moment, became mainstream.