The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate was adapted into a film that is one of The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made – you find a multitude of notes on motion pictures from The NYT 1,000 and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel

 

The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate was adapted into a film that is one of The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made – you find a multitude of notes on motion pictures from The NYT 1,000 and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel

 

8 out of 10

 

This has reminded me of Anton Chekhov https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-shooting-party-by-anton-chekhov-we.html and his own Shooting Party, he famously said "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep." There are different versions of this

 

Indeed, the principle is respected in The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate: except there is not one gun, but maybe more than one hundred, ready to murder hundreds, probably thousands of pheasants, ducks and other poor animals – Sir Randolph Nettleby does offer a defense at some point, saying they had the birds brought to life

James Mason is formidable, as almost always, in the role of the landlord who has organized this party, he has a massive property, castle, servants, he wants to keep things as they are, just as the hero of The Leopard https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-leopard-by-giuseppe-tomasi-di.html by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

 

Prince Don Fabrizio Salina is The Leopard and he says ‘for things to remain the same, everything has to change’, and the transformation would be calamitous for Sir Randolph Nettleby and much of humanity, seeing as after their Shooting Party, World War I would erupt, and we get to hear about the fate of many of the protagonists of this narrative

I was thinking that the guns shooting at the start – and in the middle and at other times, after all, the title is self-explanatory – announce the fact that the poor Wild Duck https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-wild-duck-by-henrik-ibsen.html will be killed - but I was wrong

 

This boy has found a duckling, took care of it, she comes back, after she flies to the pond to meet her mates, except with all these guest blazing, the chances are that she will be shot, actually, one of the more obnoxious fellows says ‘if it flies above me, it has no chance’, words to that effect, to which the boy replies:

‘I will kill you’, and when asked how, he says through prayer…spoiler alert, the bird is safe in the end, I have two macaws so I favor the winged creatures, they are frequently in the photos I insert in these notes, only they do not show on Goodreads – and I did not bother to see what can be done about it – but they are visible on the blog

 

There is another way in which Chekhov is present here, namely The Checkoff formula: “you take a lot of characters, all miserable because of something they won't do, and let them talk without influencing each other for three acts, and at the last moment you introduce some arbitrary calamity, or some proposed change like a return to Petrograd or a holiday in the Cry-mere, which you know won't make any difference to any of them, and then you go on for ten minutes or so after the thing should have stopped even by your own standards, to show how delicate and unemphatic your art is” that was from Kingsley Amis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/memoirs-by-kingsley-amis-author-of-take.html

 

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – I am on Goodreads as Realini Ionescu, at least for the moment, if I keep on expressing my views on Orange Woland aka TACO, it may be a short-lived presence

Also, maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the benefits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

 There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

 

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’

 

 

 

 

 

 

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