84 Charing Cross Road

1987's 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD could be deemed a love story.   I guess it is, in a way.  Certainly one for the excitement of handling and maybe even reading an antique book, a first edition bound in material not common in the United States.  Also for the city of London.  I watched this film for the first time nearly a week after I returned from my first trip there, the excitement still coursing through my heart and brain.  When Helene Hanff finally made the trip across the Atlantic in 1969, her excitement was tempered by the discovery of an empty shop at the titular address.  Once housing the Marks & Co. bookseller.  She never got to meet the man with whom she kept up a twenty year correspondence, Frank Doel, the manager and chief buyer, as he had died of appendicitis the previous December.

Anne Bancroft plays Hanff as a blustery New Yorker who never went to college but loves obscure Brit lit, as well as differing translations of the New Testament. Such are hard to come by (or at least affordably) in late 1940s NYC, so after seeing an ad for Doel's shop in the Saturday Review she writes a request for some titles.  To her delight, Doel writes back and provides them for reasonable rates.  Over the years, the letters will get more detailed and personal between them.  The correspondence will not be limited to Doel, but also some of his co-workers and even his wife Nora (an early role for Judi Dench).  Hanff even sends gifts and care packages of food (by way of Denmark) when she learns of Britain's post war food rationings.

84 CHARING CROSS ROAD began as a novel and was adapted for the stage on its way to the screen.   Director David Jones has crafted one of the warmest, coziest bits of cinema I can recall, a film not characterized by plot twists or "shoe drop" moments - the type where you just know something bad is going to happen because it's been set up as such.  Here, when a young couple befriended by Helene come home to find their babysitter initially missing, there is no shocking development, but rather the discovery of a sleeping bookworm next to the crib of a safe and sound infant.  Life moments, one after another.  This is the sort of film to which you unwind, and assume a relaxed attitude toward film criticism.