![]() ![]() ![]() That chronicling, via visual cues, of the passage of time is just one of the many ways this movie communicates that may be too subtle for many viewers. Hair styles, current events, the sound of rock music heard from a passing radio, act like clocks to remind the viewer of the passage of time in this relationship. Both Helene and Frank are living in distinctly 1949 dwellings when their exchange begins, and are living in more modern dwellings toward the end of the story. ![]() The film lovingly and deftly chronicles the decades' changes in fashion, not just in clothing, but also in architecture. Their exchange of letters lasts decades into the future. ![]() When Hanff can't find a book she needs locally (and that she can't find a book she needs locally tells you something about her expansive tastes - she lives in Manhattan, after all, not a shabby place to book shop), Hanff begins writing to a London book shop, Marks and Cohen, staffed by one Frank Doel. Writers dream of having a reader like this to interact in dialogue with their works. She is like the very best of interlocutors. She is the kind of reader that every writer dreams of writing for - she is like a sponge, soaking up every word she is like a bell when an author's words strike her, she rings. She is a no-nonsense lover of life, cigarettes, hard liquor, and books. Helene Hanff (Anne Bancroft), is a single New Yorker, of mixed Jewish and Christian family. If you are the kind of observant, sensitive person who can see someone sitting on a park bench and intuit their biography from the way they wear their scarf, hold their bodies, and read their newspaper, you will *hear* all that this movie is saying, and it will move you to tears. Viewers who require movies to shovel piping hot, sex-and-violence-drenched plot down their gullets won't get this movie it will pass right over their heads. "84 Charring Cross Road" is a luscious, intelligent, delicate, epistolary love story. ![]()
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