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Steady as she goes, Number One
1. I really felt for the cockroach I met on the stairs down to the Red Line at Park Street, cowering from the upward flood of commuters. It was backed into a little corner of the step. Its antennae were vibrating madly. It had nowhere to dart into. I wanted suddenly to scoop it up and take it to safety, but I didn't think I could do so safely, sanitarily, or without getting one or both of us stepped on. The rush of people was dense and fast-moving and directed almost completely against me. So instead I was very careful to step around it; I hope others did the same. I do not like cockroaches when they appear in my house, but I don't think that means they should all get squashed in subways.
2. No, I had no idea that Donald Sinden was one of only two people to attend the funeral of Lord Alfred Douglas. I think I've seen him only in The Cruel Sea (1953), but I love that movie so much. I am sorry he's gone.
3. Have a film-related note that appears to have been sitting on my desktop since 2012:
One of the silent stars I've missed most in the sound era is Richard Barthelmess, whom I've only seen in speaking roles—the tough-break protagonist of William Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933), a fascinating supporting part in Only Angels Have Wings (1939). It is incomprehensible to me that he was out of movies entirely by 1942, because from a modern perspective he transitions beautifully from one style to the next, especially in his low-key, naturalistic acting, his slightly rough tenor voice and his neat-boned face. For Wellman, he's a dogged, flawed pre-Code hero, sometimes coping well with the incredible crap fate hands him and sometimes not, keeping his head above cynicism only by virtue of a kind of resigned humanist faith. He gives an amazing interior performance as the disgraced and ostracized flyer in Angels, a man who enters every scene with his shoulders tensed and a wary, half-defiant flick of a look from under his brows, his mouth braced down like a tight little reverse smile. He never says anything to defend himself; his stone face is mistaken by the other pilots for a lack of shame. He has such thick dark lashes, every time he lowers his eyes is as good as a blow. He makes two or three films after that and retires. I could have watched him happily for years. I have to assume the world of talking pictures was one in which he didn't want to—or perhaps felt he couldn't—remain.
4. Satire doesn't usually become sincere. It's a lot easier to ironize something than it is to take it the other way. Nevertheless, I have an example stuck in my head.
There's a music-hall song from 1915 called "A Conscientious Objector." I've mentioned it before. The narrator is an affected, effeminate, squeamish little conscript who's bitchy to his commanding officers, readily agrees that "I don't object to fighting Huns—but should hate them fighting me," and begs for anyone, anyone to be sent to the front instead of him. It's the punch line of the chorus—what starts off like a military roll call (send out the Army and the Navy, send out the rank and file) ends like Room 101. But for God's sake don't send me! Everybody got it? Anyone who calls themselves a pacifist is really just a scaredy-cat. And probably queer.
Flash forward to the next war (I suspect the change of occurring earlier, but I've only heard recordings from World War II) and the song has been taken up by actual soldiers who sing "I Don't Want to Join the Army" with feeling. The narrator isn't a conchie, just a guy who would much rather stay home than head to war. Despite his distaste for action, his virility is no longer in question—he spends the verses detailing his success in the sack and worrying about getting his junk shot off. The chorus, apart from a few updated references (call out the Royal Air Force) and slightly more profanity (call out the bloody cavalry), is unchanged. But for Christ's sake don't call me! Everybody got it? Anyone who doesn't want to get shot is a sensible, sympathetic person. And could totally be spending that time screwing a lady.
So let's hear it for subversion. Sadly, I don't have a third version where the narrator very sensibly doesn't want to get shot and could totally be spending that time screwing a guy, so what I can offer is Alan Cumming at Broadway Backwards 2011, doing "Don't Tell Mama" with soldiers. In a pair of leather pants.
5. Seriously, I needed a fifth thing after that? Here, have this Harry Potter cosplay.
[edit] Okay, here's the Pacific Rim making-of documentary. And now I really am going to bed.
2. No, I had no idea that Donald Sinden was one of only two people to attend the funeral of Lord Alfred Douglas. I think I've seen him only in The Cruel Sea (1953), but I love that movie so much. I am sorry he's gone.
3. Have a film-related note that appears to have been sitting on my desktop since 2012:
One of the silent stars I've missed most in the sound era is Richard Barthelmess, whom I've only seen in speaking roles—the tough-break protagonist of William Wellman's Heroes for Sale (1933), a fascinating supporting part in Only Angels Have Wings (1939). It is incomprehensible to me that he was out of movies entirely by 1942, because from a modern perspective he transitions beautifully from one style to the next, especially in his low-key, naturalistic acting, his slightly rough tenor voice and his neat-boned face. For Wellman, he's a dogged, flawed pre-Code hero, sometimes coping well with the incredible crap fate hands him and sometimes not, keeping his head above cynicism only by virtue of a kind of resigned humanist faith. He gives an amazing interior performance as the disgraced and ostracized flyer in Angels, a man who enters every scene with his shoulders tensed and a wary, half-defiant flick of a look from under his brows, his mouth braced down like a tight little reverse smile. He never says anything to defend himself; his stone face is mistaken by the other pilots for a lack of shame. He has such thick dark lashes, every time he lowers his eyes is as good as a blow. He makes two or three films after that and retires. I could have watched him happily for years. I have to assume the world of talking pictures was one in which he didn't want to—or perhaps felt he couldn't—remain.
4. Satire doesn't usually become sincere. It's a lot easier to ironize something than it is to take it the other way. Nevertheless, I have an example stuck in my head.
There's a music-hall song from 1915 called "A Conscientious Objector." I've mentioned it before. The narrator is an affected, effeminate, squeamish little conscript who's bitchy to his commanding officers, readily agrees that "I don't object to fighting Huns—but should hate them fighting me," and begs for anyone, anyone to be sent to the front instead of him. It's the punch line of the chorus—what starts off like a military roll call (send out the Army and the Navy, send out the rank and file) ends like Room 101. But for God's sake don't send me! Everybody got it? Anyone who calls themselves a pacifist is really just a scaredy-cat. And probably queer.
Flash forward to the next war (I suspect the change of occurring earlier, but I've only heard recordings from World War II) and the song has been taken up by actual soldiers who sing "I Don't Want to Join the Army" with feeling. The narrator isn't a conchie, just a guy who would much rather stay home than head to war. Despite his distaste for action, his virility is no longer in question—he spends the verses detailing his success in the sack and worrying about getting his junk shot off. The chorus, apart from a few updated references (call out the Royal Air Force) and slightly more profanity (call out the bloody cavalry), is unchanged. But for Christ's sake don't call me! Everybody got it? Anyone who doesn't want to get shot is a sensible, sympathetic person. And could totally be spending that time screwing a lady.
So let's hear it for subversion. Sadly, I don't have a third version where the narrator very sensibly doesn't want to get shot and could totally be spending that time screwing a guy, so what I can offer is Alan Cumming at Broadway Backwards 2011, doing "Don't Tell Mama" with soldiers. In a pair of leather pants.
5. Seriously, I needed a fifth thing after that? Here, have this Harry Potter cosplay.
[edit] Okay, here's the Pacific Rim making-of documentary. And now I really am going to bed.
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I was at school with Sinden's flamboyant son Jeremy- who followed him into the theatre and died young. Sinden used to be visible around the place on Founder's Day.
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I see England (of a certain set of classes) as an intricate crochet-work, each thread knotted to a dozen others, knotted to a dozen dozen...
Nine
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Boston is like that, too, though. The way four separate friends of mine all turned out to know the owners of Journeyman!
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What an interconnected place the world is. That's wonderful. Thank you for the story!
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But this one was SO tiny and I think, judging by its antennas, it was scared, too.
I feel ya on that one.
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The canary in the mine, the cockroach in the kitchen . . .
(I find that surprisingly tragic!)
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Pleased to meet you! Sorry for the delay in reply; it's been a week of deadlines and I am still catching up on comments.
my threshold is at Gandalf YOU SHALL NOT PASS levels.
Aaaaaaagh, cockroaches of fire and shadow. A concept I had never before envisioned and may now be haunted by.
I feel ya on that one.
Thank you.
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I quote Tumblr: "I view him and SWINTON as the benevolent, saucy, ambiguous godparents we ALL need." (http://itslarsyouguys.tumblr.com/post/97300911503/gothiccharmschool-ethermaiden)
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I can get behind that.
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Nice.
And I like that your sympathies went out to the poor cockroach, no doubt influenced by the desperate movements of those graceful antennae, somewhat like lashes.
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It's a great movie. I've never really written about it, but it's this strange, capricious, wholly committed mix of romantic love story and platonic love story and adventure story and war story (except that now it's peacetime, but you can draw a direct line from the fatalistic flyers of The Dawn Patrol's Royal Flying Corps to the hard-drinking pilots of Geoff Carter's Barranca Airways) and some people find redemption and happiness and some people don't and a lot of it is very funny and nothing in it is taken lightly except the things that deserve to be, like death and mourning, and I've only seen it once on TCM and I liked it a lot. Jean Arthur felt she was miscast as the romantic lead and so did Hawks, apparently to the detriment of the picture in both their opinions, but I didn't know that before I saw the film and I don't think it suffers from her. You can imagine other actresses afterward, but she has good chemistry with Cary Gant. I would love for the HFA to screen a Howard Hawks retrospective. I would attend most of it.
And I like that your sympathies went out to the poor cockroach, no doubt influenced by the desperate movements of those graceful antennae, somewhat like lashes.
Hah!
(I do hope it got home all right.)
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brilliant throwaway line buried in a third-level comment! That should be all over Tumblr or Twitter.
ETA: Okay, second-level, not third. But still.
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Heh. Thank you.
(Thomas Mitchell is also very good in it. I think I like him best in The Long Voyage Home (1940), because I like almost everyone in that film best of their careers, but he plays a kind of traditional supporting turn Only Angels Have Wings and then takes it in some unexpected directions. There are really about four protagonists in the film; he's one of them.)
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Because I ended up trying to find more information on this: a variety of things seem to have happened (none of which directly answer the question, but which fill in the picture a bit).
He was (or felt he was) aging out of the leading man role as he hit 40. Then in the mid-30s, he decided to get cosmetic surgery; the cuts got infected and he was left with heavy scarring, which he was very depressed about. He didn't return to movies for three years (though he seems to have done theatre), and then it was for Only Angels Have Wings, where Howard Hawks persuaded him to play the role without makeup covering the scars, because Hawks felt it was right for the part. During WWII, he enlisted in the Navy Reserve and served as a lieutenant commander, and after that, he never returned to cinema; apparently he'd done very well investing his money, so could live off that.
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I'd heard that from reading about Only Angels Have Wings; it's always interested me because the scars have never been that obvious from the audience. He looks bruised under the eyes, as if sleepless, but not much more. It does work well for the character. I would not have attributed it to permanent scarring without inside knowledge, nor would I say it ruined his looks. But these things always feel different from the inside.
During WWII, he enlisted in the Navy Reserve and served as a lieutenant commander, and after that, he never returned to cinema; apparently he'd done very well investing his money, so could live off that.
That I hadn't known. Thank you!
(He must have a biography somewhere. I hope it's a good one. I have a couple of biographies which are only so-so, but since they're the only ones for their subjects, I got them.)
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I've heard of it as a Capone riff! Where did you find it?
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https://my.mail.ru/mail/vm_gluschenko/video/52457/140000.html
ETA: I've found a lot of stuff on that site by means of searching by film name and year, and sometimes using Google Translate to check titles.
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I KNOW RIGHT?
You see why after that one movie I started tracking him down.
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I'm thinking I might track down some of his silents.
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Yes. And I've still never written about the movie. Every time I try, it spins off into a massive unwieldy stream of consciousness with too many footnotes. But I love him as Bat Macpherson né Kilgallen. He does some fascinating things with his body language.
[edit] DAMMIT, DONE.
I'm thinking I might track down some of his silents.
I would be very interested to hear what you think. Broken Blossoms (1919) keeps coming around on TCM, but for obvious reasons that isn't the first one I want to see. (In an ideal world, I would be able to see him first in The Patent Leather Kid (1927), because that was the first movie my cinema-loving grandfather remembered seeing. But no one ever seems to show that one.)
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*quiet screaming*
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I hope it gave satisfaction.