Our heads are just houses without enough windows

[sovay]

I am awake early for a rehearsal. I slept about five hours and managed one of those intensely plotted dreams of which I retain only a fragment like a movie trailer of a woman in a high-waisted white Empire gown running through a pre-dawn or dusk the same drowned blue as her eyes; she is stumbling down an empty road with clouds hanging over the fields and as she runs her face begins to stream like water or ectoplasm, coiling and thickening the air behind her. The funny thing is that it wasn't a nightmare, but I don't know what it was. I would have thought one thing if she was running toward the sea, but she wasn't.

Comments

[sovay]

and are now replying to everything with “was you dere, Charlie?!”

That is occasionally heard around our household, too. (Now I want to rewatch Picture Snatcher.)

We then watched Wake Up The Gypsy In Me, the cartoon which was also included on the dvd, and stared at each other going “wtf did we just watch?!”

I've never even heard of that! Care to attempt to describe?

[moon_custafer]

So, um, if Rudolf Ising and everybody involved in making this particular Merrie Melodies ended up being called in front of HUAC for it three decades later, I would not be the least bit surprised. Per the Wikipedia entry:
The plot concerns a village of Russian Gypsies, led by a caricature of jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman, generally singing, dancing and whooping it up, when the mad monk Rice-Puddin' (a caricature of Grigori Rasputin) casts his eye on one of the apparently underage girls in the village and has her abducted in an attempt to force himself upon her. The villagers revolt and rescue the girl and give Rice-Puddin' just due.

I will add that “Rice-pudding the Mad Monk” is drawn like every anti-semitic cartoon you ever saw, and besides apparently being a pedophile he cheats at jigsaw puzzles. I can’t even. I don’t think this cartoon even made it into the Golden Age of Warner Brothers Animation dvd set, though if you’re curious I’m sure it’s on the internet somewhere.

Meanwhile, Andrew (who says hi, btw) went on the internet in search of more Cagney movies and found Johnny Come Lately (1943), which like The Time of Your Life was made by William Cagney Productions. I’m beginning to think a slightly numinous vibe was a hallmark for the Cagneys— in this one Grace George, whose career apart from this movie was on Broadway, and who looks not unlike Lilian Gish in Night of the Hunter, is a crusading newspaper editor who stands mostly alone against the man who owns her small town in 1908; she’s at the end of her rope when she befriends Tom Richards (Cagney) a drifter with just enough scraps of backstory (crushed idealistic reporter and poet turned hobo) that he’s *probably* human and not a benign trickster god. They bond over a shared love for The Pickwick Papers and from their second or third scene Tom is clearly head-over-heels in a platonic-romantic way for this stubborn, kind woman thirty years his senior, even if she thinks it might be nice if he got together with her niece (he doesn’t, because this picture doesn’t roll that way). Also features Hattie McDaniels, Margaret Hamilton, Marjorie Main, and (I’m guessing) everybody Cagney liked working with.