"A bittersweet tale of those other hard times"
Brian Gorman

If there's one thing that sets the "Booky" TV movies apart from others of their type, it's what Stuart Hughes calls "the darkness" that is always lurking around their edges.

"Booky's Crush," airing Sunday, Feb. 15, on CBC Television, is the third in a series of family dramas about the Thomson family living through the Depression in Toronto.

Hughes and his real-life wife, Megan Follows, star as the mother and father, Thomas and Francy.

"It has a gentle side, but there's also a harsher edge, an uglier edge," he says of the stories. "There's reference to him taking the belt to the kids. There's reference to parents of some other kids drinking heavily.

"The tensions of poverty are starting to wear thin on the relationships."

Like its predecessors, "Booky Makes Her Mark" and "Booky and the Secret Santa," this movie is based on a series of children's novels by Bernice Thurman Hunter, a former Eaton's employee who published her first book in 1981, when she was 59.

And like the others, it was filmed in Hamilton, Ont., because so little of Depression-era Toronto remains as it was in the 1930s.

"Booky's Crush" tells a pair of parallel stories.

A new boy has come to school — someone with a whiff of danger about him — and Beatrice "Booky" Thomson (Rachel Marcus) has fallen hard.

Meanwhile, her brother Arthur (Dylan Everett) has begun to display exceptional artistic ability.

This has put him in conflict with his father, a harness maker who has had to abandon his craft, which has no financial potential, for a factory job that pays the bills.

"He's lost his identity," Follows says. "He's not a chocolate-factory worker. He's a harness maker.

"In the books, you really get a sense, because of his work with horses, because of where he comes from, that he has become obsolete. This is another relevant theme to what we experience today."

Follows is well known to Canadian audiences from her appearances as Anne of Green Gables, as well as in such roles as Shania Twain's fiery mother, Sharon, in "Shania: A Life in Eight Albums" — which earned her a Gemini nomination.

Hughes is well known to theater aficionados from his appearances at the Stratford and Shaw festivals, in Toronto and in regional theaters across Canada. After earning a Gemini nomination for "Booky Makes Her Mark," however, he's becoming more familiar to the TV audience.

He and Follows had worked together onstage before, but the "Booky" movies are their first screen roles together.

"Stuart and I met in the theater," Follows says. "He has a long a successful career in the theater, and my background is primarily film and television, although I've done a lot of work in the theater as well.

"It's great to do something you love with someone who also loves it, and be able to help each other out in areas where you're more comfortable."

Being married and having children, Hughes says, gives him and Follows a bit of an advantage when it comes to crafting their characters.

"It's a plus on a number of levels," he says. "We have a shorthand as actors, and then we have a shorthand as parents. My character has a bit of a stern hand, and Megan can remind me of moments when I'm guilty of using that."

As Follows says, current conditions have made "Booky's Crush" a bit less of a nostalgia piece than it seemed to be when it was being made.

With the economic collapse, she points out, watching the movie has become "another kind of bittersweetness."

"I think even as we were making 'Booky,' it was beginning to hit the fan, in terms of the global markets and the stock markets starting to dance," she says.

"Who knew that a period piece would become something cut from the headlines, economics affecting families, and the stress and the pressure on families trying to survive in hard times?

"So in a way, I think it has become contemporary."

This brings us back to that darkness that Hughes talked about.

A subplot of "Booky's Crush" involves an old friend of Thomas' (Tom McCamus) who has lost his job and has been dropped like a dirty rag by all his friends, including the Thomsons.

We see him at a birthday party, secretly drinking and glaring at his fair-weather friends.

As Follows says, it adds a slightly ominous tone similar to the one we see in the news today, that "the roller coaster is about to go down."

Source: The Lindsay Post