"The English Patient" (1998) Visits The Pre-WWII British Empire Which Was Obviously Very Attractive In Many Ways.

Rating: 4/10 (30 December 2012)

"The English Patient" (1998) Visits The Pre-WWII British Empire Which Was Obviously Very Attractive In Many Ways.
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Some movies not wonderful in important ways are still worth seeing due to the "side show" part of them which includes travel to and depiction of interesting places and people.
"The English Patient" (1998) is such a movie.....the main part is a soap-opera tear-jerker movie presenting sad results of forbidden romance and terrible outcomes for the main characters (the lovers....both boy and girl.... get karmic, wrath of God vengeance for committing adultery and not paying close enough disciplined attention to supporting the victors of WWII....he gets his face burned off and becomes a terminal burn case ....not just his face...and she ends up dying alone in a dark, cold cave in the middle of the Sahara desert waiting for her lover to rescue her, but waiting in vain).
Obey the 10 Commandments (esp. the one about adultery, and not committing it!), and be patriotic, guys and girls.....and this won't happen to you! Well........about 80% of "The English Patient" (1998) is soap-opera/ tear jerker stuff, and that's not my cup of tea, to use an English phrase of fame.
However, I stuck out watching the whole (very long) movie because it won the Best Picture Academy Award for it's year, and a lot of people thought it was good (almost 400 people reviewed it for Amazon.Com as I write this in late 2012).
I noticed good parts of the movie, and they made me reflect that "every cloud has a silver lining" regarding bad movies in the sense that often, especially in big expensive movies like "The English Patient" (1998), a lot of trouble is taken to show "counterpoint" stuff quite opposite from the grim, sad themes and events the (masochistic, to my thinking) audience gets its face shoved into for most of the movie.
Life for English participants in the pre-WWII British Empire in places like Egypt, and especially in regional colonial centers like the capital city of Cairo, was pretty good. The English had a lot of money which was used largely to import, wholesale, the "good life" from England.
All over the Empire, importation/ set-up occurred of wonderful, full service hotels with great dining rooms, wonderful food (which England is not famous for back home in England), and tuxedoed dance bands playing Cole Porter and Irving Berlin movie tune music for tuxedoed and gowned couples.
The managerial class, at least, lived well during it's leisure time all over the pre-WWII British Empire, and before 1939 (before 1948, actually) the sun never set on it.
Singapore, Delhi, Cairo, Jamaica, Montreal, Capetown, and many other British colony countries boasted terrific hotels, dining rooms, and dance bands, and romantic, sometimes adulterous Brit couples (now long dead) could trip the light fantastic in wonderful exotic places much better to live in than the home country, England.
Willing, efficient, attractive servants with no ideas of revolt helped out. Prices were cheap, and good times were many.
This was one of the good parts about the British Empire, at least for many who were part of it, helped it run, or ended up in Brit. Empire outposts like Cairo and got in on it all for whatever reasons, and with whatever credentials.
"The English Patient" (1998) shows this side of the pre-WWII British Empire in Egypt during the course of the movie....not much, and not for long, relative to the rest of the famously long movie....but enough to be worthwhile, and to see good places and good times for British subjects depicted away from dreary England, with it's famously bad weather and bad food, and oppressive class system (oppressive for non-upper class people).
The good times are over, but "The English Patient" (1998) provides an important "homage" to it all.........afternoon tea dances, well dressed, healthy blue-eyed white people eating good food at leisure in palm-tree decorated dining rooms looking out onto lovely, exotic views all over the world.
Nice work if you can get it!
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Written by Tex (David) Allen, SAG movie actor.
Email to TexAllen@Rocketmail.Com
Biography details about Tex at WWW.IMDb.Me/TexAllen