cunningpal

This past winter, Murphy went to see the film of "Tender Is the Night." He went alone (Sara flatly refused to go) one Friday afternoon to a theatre in Nyack, near the small Hudson River community where he and Sara now live, and when he sat down he realized that there was no one else in the vast, darkened auditorium but an elderly charwoman sweeping the back rows. "It was an extraordinary sensation," he says, "and oddly appropriate somehow to the unreality of the film, which disregards everything except the battle of the sexes, and dismisses the lure of the era with a nostalgic ridiculing of the Charleston. It was so far from any sort of relationship to us, or the period, or poor Scott, that I couldn't feel any emotion at all except a vague sympathy for Jennifer Jones trying so hard to play the eighteen-year-old Nicole.

This is a quotation from Calvin Tompkins' profile of the Murphys, from the New Yorker Magazine, July 28, 1962.