Read the book

I read John O'Hara's novel "From the Terrace" after seeing the movie. As I remember it the novel is a tremendously lengthy one. If I had to select my favorite O'Hara novel it would be "Appointment in Samarra" which doesn't suffer the flaws of later O'Hara works (notably running too long). I'm always amused to hear Caroline English mentioned in the motion picture - the heroine of "Appointment in Samarra."

I had a 1965 MG-B once in 1983 - pristine condition but I could not handle the electrical problems - probably those Lucas components as well. Really fun to drive when it ran.

What I was really struck about with THIS movie, though, was the not so subtle characterization of "evil capitalism" portrayed here as the REAL badness. Right in line with Communist propaganda e.g.:

Marx and Engels spoke of the family life of the bourgeoisie in terms of greed, oppression, exploitation, boredom, adultery, and prostitution. The bourgeois family was quite corrupt, but, and this was for them a main point, it pretended to be something quite different. In fact, "boredom and money are the binding factor, ... but to this ... dirty existence corresponds the sacred conception of it in official phraseology and in general hypocrisy." Again and again they stress that the bourgeois family is in a state of de facto dissolution (Auflosung). The "inner bond" of the family ties of "obedience, piety, marital troth" were all gone. Nothing was left but "property relations" and their consequences.

{p. 16} Thoughts of property and money, the spirit of exchange, dominated the ties of the bourgeois with his wife and with his child. Future husbands haggled with future fathers-in-law over the size of the dowry, while fathers and sons sparred greedily over the question of inheritance. Under these conditions there could be no true love between husband and wife a fact institutionalized, claimed Marx and Engels, in the "marriage of convenience." Hence, marriage among the bourgeoisie amounted to forced cohabitation, or, as a favorite phrase had it, de facto prostitution, in which the woman "only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery" (p. 63). In addition to exploitation of the helpless wife - both of her labor in open or concealed domestic slavery" as "head servant" in the household, and of her body as producer of an heir or simply as an object of loveless lust - there were broader developments. The first, about which gels seemed rather ambivalent, was adultery. The second, about which he had nothing good to say, was prostitution. Both were said to be part and parcel of bourgeois family life, an assertion that is apparently to be understood in quite a literal sense. Of course, Marx and Engels conducted no field studies on these matters, but Engels confidently describes the supplanting of feudalism by the bourgeois social order in France: "The right' of the first night' passed from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution assumed proportions hitherto unknown. Marriage itself remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and was besides supplemented by widespread adultery."