![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Drink when you can in this job, that's my motto
The Spy in Black (U.S. U-Boat 29, 1939) played on TCM recently, so I got to show it to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel last night. It is the first collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, working as director and screenwriter respectively under the auspices of Alexander Korda; it was as good as I had remembered from five years ago; it is still not on DVD, which feels particularly inexcusable and bewildering since it appears on TCM courtesy of Criterion, who evidently can't be bothered to get off their tacks and give it a proper release rather than just streaming. I wrote briefly about it in 2011, by way of introduction to Powell and Pressburger's equally weird and worthy follow-up Contraband (U.S. Blackout, 1940):
Veidt and Hobson had starred together the previous year in The Spy in Black (1939), the film on which Powell and Pressburger met; it was a neat little World War I espionage flick, with Veidt as a U-boat captain come ashore in the Orkneys to lead a raid on Scapa Flow and Hobson as his apparent contact, a cool schoolmistress with more layers than he's prepared for, maddeningly attractive to him because of her ice-nerve professionalism, not in spite of it. Their chemistry is terrific; it's almost not possible to believe the sudden revelation that she's the wife of the supposedly disgraced and turncoat naval officer who's been feeding Veidt information about the disposition of the British fleet and that she was dragooned at the last minute into her role of double agent, because she seems so much more in her element with a small pistol in her hand and nothing to be read in her eyes at all.
Having spent most of my attention on Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson the first time around, this time I could spare some appreciation for second-billed Sebastian Shaw, who appears first to the audience and Veidt's Captain Hardt as the dissolute, disloyal Lieutenant Ashington, recently busted down from commander for losing his destroyer in a moment of drunken carelessness and resentful enough of it to offer aid and comfort to the enemy so long as they offer him plenty of liquor and Hobson's Fräulein Tiel in return. In later life Shaw apparently looked back on his pre-war acting as "rotten" and described himself dismissively as "a piece of cinema beefcake" who didn't start learning his trade instead of relying on his pretty face until after his stint in the RAF, but I hope he made an exception for Ashington. He is good-looking, but his rounded bones look insipid next to Veidt's intense, iconic angles and in any case the man's insolent, petulant manner ensures that the audience catches any unpleasant aspect of his features first: the thinness of his mouth that stretches a sneer more easily than any other expression, the wide curve of his cheek suggesting softness without youth; his fine dark lashes give his eyes a dreamy look that is belied instantly by the sarcastic pinch of his brows and the dissipated creases under his eyes. He isn't a mess, but he's sloppy—uniform jacket unbuttoned, dark hair a little tousled, always a glass in his hand. He smokes while his contacts silently refrain; when Hardt won't take a drink with him, he makes a point of knocking back the extra ration himself. He has a good voice, crisp, a little dry, but when he's not drawling his lines with deliberate hostility, he rattles them nervily out. Put him in another film and he might be the fuck-up with charisma, but the audience of The Spy in Black is not directed to find him charming: we have already been impressed with serious, seasoned Hardt and his dedication to a job he would rather not have been detailed for—he is a career navy man who follows his orders from Berlin with punctual invention but wears his captain's uniform whenever possible so that "if [he's] shot, it will be as an officer, not a spy"—and nothing about faithless Ashington inspires any competing affection, especially not his passive-aggressive attitude toward his beautiful handler, who may have bought his cooperation with her body but doesn't bother to pretend she's enjoying it. The best he might get from the viewer is a wince of sympathy when Hardt ditches him in the blowing sea-fog by the Old Man of Hoy to rendezvous with his crew aboard U-29 while Ashington with no coat on swears and shivers and paces and drinks and complains to Tiel as soon as they get back: "Damn fellow left me sitting in the heather!" (Hardt responds, grinning, "It's not our custom to entertain British naval officers during the war, however useful they may have been.") In his delicately sketched combination of weakness and cynicism, he reminds me oddly and strikingly of Denholm Elliott, who was sixteen at the time of filming and wouldn't essay these kinds of characters for another twenty-five years.
Ashington only loses credibility, in fact, when the script reveals him as RN Commander David Blacklock—even the name sounds like it belongs in a romance novel—the trusty, patriotic counter-spy who's been posing as a drunken traitor all this while. Required to trade in his air of spiteful ill-usage for steely determination, Shaw stiffens and flattens immediately into a hero-shaped space in the plot while Hobson melts correspondingly from stone cold Fräulein Tiel to frightened Jill Blacklock who has been making her spy game up as she goes along. It's a great reversal in terms of the romance: the mission-focused, honorable Hardt fell in love or something like it with the resourceful Tiel even as she coolly tolerated the casual physical attentions of the necessary but distasteful Ashington, who was really her beloved husband watching the competence-porn sparks fly between her and the man they were both sent to ensnare. That is Hitchcock-quality identity-twisting suspense and some part of me is sorry it's not the entire film, although much of what makes Spy so effective and memorable is its sympathetic enemy perspective on the eve of World War II, which I would not want to forfeit for a tighter focus on more traditional leads. In acting terms, however, the Blacklocks were so good as a strong woman and a weak man—and so unconvincing as the conventional reverse—that the audience may be forgiven wondering if this revelation is yet another ruse. Sadly, it is not. The gender codes are nowhere else in the movie as bad as this one scene, but it is not comfortable to watch Jill nestle into her husband's protective arms and whisper, "Yes, darling," while he reassures her that the danger is past with terms of endearment like "Little fool" and "Idiot!" It feels like an unsubtle and not obviously ironic touch when he doffs his dark peacoat to wrap his shivering wife in and underneath we see a cable-knit sweater and silk scarf that all but glow in the dark, knight-white as shining armor. Luckily, Jill will recover her self-possession in the cat-and-mouse of the final act; it interests me that her dashing cardboard husband only starts to feel real again when he becomes afraid for his wife. Realizing that the ferry he put her on has been hijacked by Hardt, David Blacklock folds and tenses at once: brave face, ramrod shoulders. He visibly suppresses a protest when his CO tells him that he'll "have to forget personal affairs." Once he's allowed to take a ship after the captured steamer, he can't stop himself from asking the captain, "Can't you shake it up a bit?" when the destroyer is obviously running "flat out." It is not presented undercuttingly, though he looks desperately anxious during the sinking of the St Magnus (in one of the film's many complex ironies, by Hardt's own submarine) and waves to Jill without a trace of stiff upper lip when he finally spots her in one of the lifeboats. I suspect it was a deliberate choice, since Pressburger's screenplay insists from start to finish on the humanity of all combatants, the crew of U-29 and the nameless POWs aboard the St Magnus as much as the villagers of Longhope. I just can't help feeling that Commander Blacklock was meant to be as compelling a heroic adversary for Hardt as he was a seedy collaborator and the actor couldn't quite pull it off. I don't blame him for it; Lawful Good is complicated. Peter Cushing and Chris Evans just make it look easy. I would not be surprised if at that point in his career Shaw had figured out how to play weakness but not yet strength—and the script didn't give him a saving assist. I still wouldn't call it rotten acting when two-thirds of it works for me, but I find the failure point fascinating.
In any case, while I know where to look for more Valerie Hobson and more Conrad Veidt, I will have to research what else Sebastian Shaw did on film or TV that might interest me. As far as I can tell, I have seen him otherwise only in Return of the Jedi (1983), at least before George Lucas went back and mostly swapped in Hayden Christiansen. Everything comes back to Star Wars eventually. There is at least one rip of The Spy in Black available on YouTube and others may lurk elsewhere on the internet. I do recommend chasing it with Contraband if you can. This thumbnail brought to you by my loyal backers at Patreon.
derspatchel last night. It is the first collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, working as director and screenwriter respectively under the auspices of Alexander Korda; it was as good as I had remembered from five years ago; it is still not on DVD, which feels particularly inexcusable and bewildering since it appears on TCM courtesy of Criterion, who evidently can't be bothered to get off their tacks and give it a proper release rather than just streaming. I wrote briefly about it in 2011, by way of introduction to Powell and Pressburger's equally weird and worthy follow-up Contraband (U.S. Blackout, 1940):Veidt and Hobson had starred together the previous year in The Spy in Black (1939), the film on which Powell and Pressburger met; it was a neat little World War I espionage flick, with Veidt as a U-boat captain come ashore in the Orkneys to lead a raid on Scapa Flow and Hobson as his apparent contact, a cool schoolmistress with more layers than he's prepared for, maddeningly attractive to him because of her ice-nerve professionalism, not in spite of it. Their chemistry is terrific; it's almost not possible to believe the sudden revelation that she's the wife of the supposedly disgraced and turncoat naval officer who's been feeding Veidt information about the disposition of the British fleet and that she was dragooned at the last minute into her role of double agent, because she seems so much more in her element with a small pistol in her hand and nothing to be read in her eyes at all.
Having spent most of my attention on Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson the first time around, this time I could spare some appreciation for second-billed Sebastian Shaw, who appears first to the audience and Veidt's Captain Hardt as the dissolute, disloyal Lieutenant Ashington, recently busted down from commander for losing his destroyer in a moment of drunken carelessness and resentful enough of it to offer aid and comfort to the enemy so long as they offer him plenty of liquor and Hobson's Fräulein Tiel in return. In later life Shaw apparently looked back on his pre-war acting as "rotten" and described himself dismissively as "a piece of cinema beefcake" who didn't start learning his trade instead of relying on his pretty face until after his stint in the RAF, but I hope he made an exception for Ashington. He is good-looking, but his rounded bones look insipid next to Veidt's intense, iconic angles and in any case the man's insolent, petulant manner ensures that the audience catches any unpleasant aspect of his features first: the thinness of his mouth that stretches a sneer more easily than any other expression, the wide curve of his cheek suggesting softness without youth; his fine dark lashes give his eyes a dreamy look that is belied instantly by the sarcastic pinch of his brows and the dissipated creases under his eyes. He isn't a mess, but he's sloppy—uniform jacket unbuttoned, dark hair a little tousled, always a glass in his hand. He smokes while his contacts silently refrain; when Hardt won't take a drink with him, he makes a point of knocking back the extra ration himself. He has a good voice, crisp, a little dry, but when he's not drawling his lines with deliberate hostility, he rattles them nervily out. Put him in another film and he might be the fuck-up with charisma, but the audience of The Spy in Black is not directed to find him charming: we have already been impressed with serious, seasoned Hardt and his dedication to a job he would rather not have been detailed for—he is a career navy man who follows his orders from Berlin with punctual invention but wears his captain's uniform whenever possible so that "if [he's] shot, it will be as an officer, not a spy"—and nothing about faithless Ashington inspires any competing affection, especially not his passive-aggressive attitude toward his beautiful handler, who may have bought his cooperation with her body but doesn't bother to pretend she's enjoying it. The best he might get from the viewer is a wince of sympathy when Hardt ditches him in the blowing sea-fog by the Old Man of Hoy to rendezvous with his crew aboard U-29 while Ashington with no coat on swears and shivers and paces and drinks and complains to Tiel as soon as they get back: "Damn fellow left me sitting in the heather!" (Hardt responds, grinning, "It's not our custom to entertain British naval officers during the war, however useful they may have been.") In his delicately sketched combination of weakness and cynicism, he reminds me oddly and strikingly of Denholm Elliott, who was sixteen at the time of filming and wouldn't essay these kinds of characters for another twenty-five years.
Ashington only loses credibility, in fact, when the script reveals him as RN Commander David Blacklock—even the name sounds like it belongs in a romance novel—the trusty, patriotic counter-spy who's been posing as a drunken traitor all this while. Required to trade in his air of spiteful ill-usage for steely determination, Shaw stiffens and flattens immediately into a hero-shaped space in the plot while Hobson melts correspondingly from stone cold Fräulein Tiel to frightened Jill Blacklock who has been making her spy game up as she goes along. It's a great reversal in terms of the romance: the mission-focused, honorable Hardt fell in love or something like it with the resourceful Tiel even as she coolly tolerated the casual physical attentions of the necessary but distasteful Ashington, who was really her beloved husband watching the competence-porn sparks fly between her and the man they were both sent to ensnare. That is Hitchcock-quality identity-twisting suspense and some part of me is sorry it's not the entire film, although much of what makes Spy so effective and memorable is its sympathetic enemy perspective on the eve of World War II, which I would not want to forfeit for a tighter focus on more traditional leads. In acting terms, however, the Blacklocks were so good as a strong woman and a weak man—and so unconvincing as the conventional reverse—that the audience may be forgiven wondering if this revelation is yet another ruse. Sadly, it is not. The gender codes are nowhere else in the movie as bad as this one scene, but it is not comfortable to watch Jill nestle into her husband's protective arms and whisper, "Yes, darling," while he reassures her that the danger is past with terms of endearment like "Little fool" and "Idiot!" It feels like an unsubtle and not obviously ironic touch when he doffs his dark peacoat to wrap his shivering wife in and underneath we see a cable-knit sweater and silk scarf that all but glow in the dark, knight-white as shining armor. Luckily, Jill will recover her self-possession in the cat-and-mouse of the final act; it interests me that her dashing cardboard husband only starts to feel real again when he becomes afraid for his wife. Realizing that the ferry he put her on has been hijacked by Hardt, David Blacklock folds and tenses at once: brave face, ramrod shoulders. He visibly suppresses a protest when his CO tells him that he'll "have to forget personal affairs." Once he's allowed to take a ship after the captured steamer, he can't stop himself from asking the captain, "Can't you shake it up a bit?" when the destroyer is obviously running "flat out." It is not presented undercuttingly, though he looks desperately anxious during the sinking of the St Magnus (in one of the film's many complex ironies, by Hardt's own submarine) and waves to Jill without a trace of stiff upper lip when he finally spots her in one of the lifeboats. I suspect it was a deliberate choice, since Pressburger's screenplay insists from start to finish on the humanity of all combatants, the crew of U-29 and the nameless POWs aboard the St Magnus as much as the villagers of Longhope. I just can't help feeling that Commander Blacklock was meant to be as compelling a heroic adversary for Hardt as he was a seedy collaborator and the actor couldn't quite pull it off. I don't blame him for it; Lawful Good is complicated. Peter Cushing and Chris Evans just make it look easy. I would not be surprised if at that point in his career Shaw had figured out how to play weakness but not yet strength—and the script didn't give him a saving assist. I still wouldn't call it rotten acting when two-thirds of it works for me, but I find the failure point fascinating.
In any case, while I know where to look for more Valerie Hobson and more Conrad Veidt, I will have to research what else Sebastian Shaw did on film or TV that might interest me. As far as I can tell, I have seen him otherwise only in Return of the Jedi (1983), at least before George Lucas went back and mostly swapped in Hayden Christiansen. Everything comes back to Star Wars eventually. There is at least one rip of The Spy in Black available on YouTube and others may lurk elsewhere on the internet. I do recommend chasing it with Contraband if you can. This thumbnail brought to you by my loyal backers at Patreon.
no subject
Apparently the highest compliment Gary Oldman had ever received is from a review of Batman Begins, on his performance as not-yet-Commissioner Gordon: "he makes virtue seem interesting."
no subject
It's a good compliment! There's no philosophical reason for virtue to be boring, but too many people can't write it any other way and too many actors follow their lead.
no subject
I adored your description of Lieutenant Ashington's face--I could just see it. And Shaw stiffens and flattens immediately into a hero-shaped space in the plot made me smile.
Happy New Year!
ETA: I hasten to add that I have intense sympathy for Lawful Good. I'm not personally dismissive of it--at all. Far from it. Just, it's hard to portray, I think.
no subject
I think that's part of what I mean by "complicated." Because it has rules to go by and because they are usually the societally accepted ones, it's a kind of goodness that can look flat or conservative or as though it requires no thought, none of which is automatically true of an honorable, law-abiding person, but we live in a culture that consistently assumes evil is more interesting than good and so the less obviously conflicted the character, the more the writing and acting has to work to show us how they're not boring. Peter Cushing does it by vulnerability, showing what it costs his Van Helsing—physically, emotionally—to take on creatures of darkness again and again with no guarantees each time that it will work or, even if it does, that anyone will thank him for it rather than awkwardly wishing he'd move on and stop reminding them of the terrible thing they all had to go through. He has to be doing it for the principle of the thing; his only repayment is the knowledge that he saved lives and made the world safer and got to add to his impressive collection of scars. Chris Evans' Captain America does it by memory, never forgetting in the exercise of his super-strength what it was like not to be six foot gorgeous and capable of surviving a fall from a skyscraper, never complacent even though he now embodies the institutions rather than the outsider. He'll defend anyone who needs it, but he looks first to the people who need the most help, because he used to be one of them. If Lawful Good is going to be believable, it actually has to have some depth. There's no reason for Commander Blacklock to drop straight into two dimensions the first second he's shown as sober and brave and very much in love with his wife because he has the capacity to look like none of these things; he's just been doing something whose emotional difficulty far outweighs its physical danger (he might get shot if Hardt gets suspicious, but his wife has to spend the most time with their target—and much of it alone—so her safety depends not only on her own quick wits but on her husband's ability not to give the game away by looking jealous or protective or too interested in anything but the information he has to sell; David Blacklock has a lot of things on his plate, but Lieutenant Ashington just wants to get drunk, laid, and give the Royal Navy a black eye and get away with it) and there's no reason for it to have been easy for him. He's not a professional spy any more than his wife is. It would not diminish him as a credible opponent to Captain Hardt if he showed a few flaws and stresses; as noted, I started to believe in him again once he stopped being quite so heroically impervious. But Shaw didn't seem able to suggest anything under the heroic surface until it was written explicitly into the dialogue and since I can't see any reason for it as a deliberate directorial choice, I'm putting it on the actor. He didn't have to be dull.
I adored your description of Lieutenant Ashington's face--I could just see it.
Thank you! I couldn't find a good photograph of him—I could find (a) very few stills from this movie (b) that didn't have proprietary watermarks all over them—so I'm glad it worked.
And Shaw stiffens and flattens immediately into a hero-shaped space in the plot made me smile.
That was exactly what it felt like! The core of the film was a three-character play and all of a sudden we lost one.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year!