Two different houses surround you

[sovay]

I wish to thank my past self for buying a jar of borscht, knowing I would feel like eating it some night when it was not feasible to visit a restaurant and/or New York. I had it tonight with sour cream and dill; it was delicious. The cats tried to interpose themselves. I explained that I don't think either of them can digest sour cream. They pointed out that said nothing about beets. They did not win the argument.

After dinner I met teenybuffalo for the late show of The Wolf Man (1941) at the Brattle. It was the last major Universal horror movie I had left to see; I may try to write about it not because it's my favorite but because it really shouldn't have held together—I'm genuinely not sure in what country or century it's even supposed to be taking place—and yet it has all the right resonances under the surface to hit the audience in the id and pull off an ending I actually find devastating, like the twist in the last verse of a murder ballad. I had managed to forget that I'd seen Lon Chaney Jr. before, but he's very good and looks startlingly like his father, which can't have helped. I would watch Claude Rains and Maria Ouspenskaya read their respective phone books and instead they shared a terrific scene.

I am not convinced I have finished recovering from Arisia, but I don't think it hurt that our internet went down for most of Monday and therefore I had nothing to do but curl up on a couch with books and cats. We celebrated spatch's birthday with pho and George Herriman. I am already looking forward to the weekend, when I am seriously contemplating doing nothing at all.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

I suppose the bit about the wolfsbane being in bloom also fits with it being seasonal.

Also, why does everybody in one small English village seem to know so much about werewolves? Do they teach that poem in the local school or something?

[sovay]

Also, why does everybody in one small English village seem to know so much about werewolves? Do they teach that poem in the local school or something?

I was initially expecting the Talbots to have an ancestral strain of lycanthropy, which would explain why there's so much werewolf lore around Talbot Castle, but the film did not go in that direction.

(I'm still not sure the village is English. Everybody's named things like "Gwen Conliffe" and "Frank Andrews" and then everybody's named things like "Maleva" and "Bela." Like, I know the Romanichal are a real ethnic group, but all the Romani in this movie seem to have come direct from Eastern Europe. My current best bet for location is honestly the same mysteriously English Mitteleuropa as Hammer's Dracula.)

[moon_custafer]

Have you ever seen The Scarlet Claw (1944)? It’s one of the Universal Rathbone/Bruce Holmes movies – not a particularly good one, but I bring it up because it’s set in Canada, or rather, in the Universal Pictures version of Canada: it’s shot on their standard Little Europe backlot, everyone wears plaid flannel shirts, and about half the supporting cast have English accents while the other half attempt French-Canadian accents. I can see what Canadian stereotypes they’re building on, but the way they’ve been combined is… really weird.

[sovay]

Have you ever seen The Scarlet Claw (1944)?

No, nor any of its series, which is ridiculous considering how much I like (a) Basil Rathbone (b) Sherlock Holmes. I am fascinated by the idea of Universal Canada.

[gwynnega]

I like The Scarlet Claw a lot, but Universal Canada is indeed weird.