Down in the cellar, you're getting into making poisons
Happy Monday! My day so far has chiefly contained a doctor's appointment, wrestling with health insurance, and a steep learning curve of WordPress. Have some assorted news.
1. Strange Horizons has a new look! Check it out.
2. On November 15th—that's in three weeks—I will be reading with Kij Johnson at the Brooklyn Commons Café as part of the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings. Probably from my most recently accepted fiction, maybe some poetry as well. If you are at all in the area, come and hear!
3. On January 7th—that's next year—I will be reading at the United Photo Industries Gallery as the part of the closing event for Viktor Koen's Bestiary: Bizarre Myths & Chimerical Fancies. That will very definitely be the poem I wrote for the exhibition catalogue. More information as we approach.
4. Reproduced from comments with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rydra_wong, because I never got around to it on my own journal:
I never reviewed Lady with a Past (1932) at all, but it's worth your time if you can catch it. It's almost a screwball comedy, except that the majority of its dialogue would not have passed muster post-Code; its pacing is a mess and it needed either a different ending or to get there much more smoothly; but it also contains the not-so-secret weapon of Constance Bennett as a bookish, socially awkward heroine who decides to jump-start her social life by pretending to a scandalous reputation and hires Ben Lyon's cheerfully upfront ne'er-do-well ("I'm careless, shiftless, and extravagant") to squire her around Paris with just the right balance of salaciousness and class. She got the idea from watching the skyrocketing popularity of a woman who was acquitted of poisoning her husband; to give you an idea of the film's tone, she muses quite seriously on whether she would have to get a husband herself in order to poison him or whether poisoning just anybody's husband would do. The central and charming irony is that she doesn't actually alter her personality a jot, but now she's perceived as mysterious and fascinating instead of gauche and unapproachable and soon she's got suitors of all nationalities swarming her at parties, including her best friend's brother (David Manners) who once jilted her without knowing it after drunkenly proposing to her the night before. The strongest stretch of the film simply has these three characters bouncing off each other: Bennett is delighted to find her lack of small talk taken for smoldering enigma, Lyon is as good as his word in both his ability to play her latest louche flame while being genuinely supportive of her and his tendency to run up staggering bills in liquor and clothes, and Manners, when he drops dutifully by to look in on the wallflower, is blown off his feet by her newfound popularity and then wickedly shut out when he tries to get a courtship in edgewise. It's not a lost classic, but I found it a lot of fun. I need to see more of Constance Bennett than Topper (1937) and I still like Ben Lyon, who on the strength of this movie and Night Nurse (1931) looks like a character lead to me. I keep forgetting what happened to him beyond marrying Bebe Daniels and moving to the UK. I really enjoy David Manners so long as he's not appearing in Dracula (1931).
There is no fifth thing; I am heading off to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving, sartorias, and skogkatt in Harvard Square. I leave you with some pre-Code people.
1. Strange Horizons has a new look! Check it out.
2. On November 15th—that's in three weeks—I will be reading with Kij Johnson at the Brooklyn Commons Café as part of the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings. Probably from my most recently accepted fiction, maybe some poetry as well. If you are at all in the area, come and hear!
3. On January 7th—that's next year—I will be reading at the United Photo Industries Gallery as the part of the closing event for Viktor Koen's Bestiary: Bizarre Myths & Chimerical Fancies. That will very definitely be the poem I wrote for the exhibition catalogue. More information as we approach.
4. Reproduced from comments with
rydra_wong, because I never got around to it on my own journal:I never reviewed Lady with a Past (1932) at all, but it's worth your time if you can catch it. It's almost a screwball comedy, except that the majority of its dialogue would not have passed muster post-Code; its pacing is a mess and it needed either a different ending or to get there much more smoothly; but it also contains the not-so-secret weapon of Constance Bennett as a bookish, socially awkward heroine who decides to jump-start her social life by pretending to a scandalous reputation and hires Ben Lyon's cheerfully upfront ne'er-do-well ("I'm careless, shiftless, and extravagant") to squire her around Paris with just the right balance of salaciousness and class. She got the idea from watching the skyrocketing popularity of a woman who was acquitted of poisoning her husband; to give you an idea of the film's tone, she muses quite seriously on whether she would have to get a husband herself in order to poison him or whether poisoning just anybody's husband would do. The central and charming irony is that she doesn't actually alter her personality a jot, but now she's perceived as mysterious and fascinating instead of gauche and unapproachable and soon she's got suitors of all nationalities swarming her at parties, including her best friend's brother (David Manners) who once jilted her without knowing it after drunkenly proposing to her the night before. The strongest stretch of the film simply has these three characters bouncing off each other: Bennett is delighted to find her lack of small talk taken for smoldering enigma, Lyon is as good as his word in both his ability to play her latest louche flame while being genuinely supportive of her and his tendency to run up staggering bills in liquor and clothes, and Manners, when he drops dutifully by to look in on the wallflower, is blown off his feet by her newfound popularity and then wickedly shut out when he tries to get a courtship in edgewise. It's not a lost classic, but I found it a lot of fun. I need to see more of Constance Bennett than Topper (1937) and I still like Ben Lyon, who on the strength of this movie and Night Nurse (1931) looks like a character lead to me. I keep forgetting what happened to him beyond marrying Bebe Daniels and moving to the UK. I really enjoy David Manners so long as he's not appearing in Dracula (1931).
There is no fifth thing; I am heading off to meet
nineweaving, sartorias, and skogkatt in Harvard Square. I leave you with some pre-Code people.
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That strikes me as a sensible life decision.
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I caught it on TCM. I don't know about video, but it looks as though the only current DVD is Spanish. Given the success
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(And I'm thinking that pre-Code films are going to be one of my mental refuges when I need a break from politics, so.)
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http://veehd.com/video/4947391_Lady-With-a-Past-1932
A mere matter of hours after someone uploaded it. I'm taking it as a good omen for the year.
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W00000000000000000T!
Okay, please keep in mind that the pacing is a mess and the third act flails around like a first draft instead of a thing sent out to movie theaters with actual professional actors in it and a soundtrack and credits and all and I like the ending when the movie finally figures out what it is, but I also like the alternate romantic ending that both
A mere matter of hours after someone uploaded it. I'm taking it as a good omen for the year.
Amen!
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I did, for a brief while, but then I ran into what I refer to as the Epic Psychiatric Misadventures of '09, and I didn't get everything back after that.
(I hung onto non-fiction writing, and have been working intermittently on seeing if I can get that going somewhere again.)
Though who knows; maybe it'll come back one day if I need to fix enough films.
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Oh, right, I forgot he's in The Mummy (1932)!
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That's aggravating. So far my experience has been: non-genre films = David Manners gets a chance to play characters; genre films = David Mannes plays furniture.
There's also "Darling, why are you [breaking up with me because your father John Barrymore has escaped from the asylum and you have found out that there is HEREDITARY INSANITY in the family and you must Never Marry/breaking up with me because sleazy piano genius Lowell Sherman wants you to be his protegee]?"
LITTLE THINGS LIKE THAT.
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(And it's a fascinating example of the changed sexual morality that the Code stomped on so hard: when faced with his girlfriend having the chance to follow her piano potential, he declares variously that he doesn't own her and that she should do what's best for her, and seems sincere about this. And somewhat later in the film proposes to her even though it's clear that she's been a gold-digger along with the other leads, and the film treats it as entirely right and proper that he should want to marry her and she should end with him at the end of the fim.)
But it is still something of a Nice Handsome Young Man Generic Juvenile Lead supporting role.
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I want to see that movie even more after seeing Detour (1945) and another of Ulmer's movies that I still need to write up. And it's sounded pretty interesting from the start.
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Excellent.
(I am behind on so many movies!)
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He's very good here, even if I think he was the wrong character to end up with the heroine (if she was going to end up with anybody). You can imagine him a couple of years later in screwball, which have no idea if he ever did. I wish I could remember how he was in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), but all I registered about that movie was Claude Rains.
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The central and charming irony is that she doesn't actually alter her personality a jot, but now she's perceived as mysterious and fascinating instead of gauche and unapproachable and soon she's got suitors of all nationalities swarming her at parties --that's *excellent*. What fun. (Working my way back to your Patreon review.)
Congratulations on the readings!
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No, because the website I haven't made progress on since last year uses Drupal, but I still want to get it up and running!
--that's *excellent*. What fun.
It was a wonderful preemptive corrective to all those scenes where the librarian takes off her glasses or the dorky girl gets a makeover and suddenly everyone falls for her suddenly revealed beauty; here the makeover is all in the mind of the beholder. The film really doesn't know its own ending and it shows in the last act, but I enjoyed so much of the rest of it, I regret nothing. It's not quite a proto-Victor/Victoria, but something about the masquerade reminded me of that whole lineage of movies more than once.
Congratulations on the readings!
Thank you! I'm looking forward.