sovay | Well, nothing ever comes when you want it to

We are now on our third day of waiting for the plumber to come and fix the water in our bathroom. We have hot water again. We just don't have any kind of water out of all the taps we're supposed to. It's a bit of a problem. I watched three movies yesterday while the plumber stretched out into the long shadow of Godot. [edited 2019-12-30 17:22: The plumber arrived! He fixed the problem! The explanation was gross, but our shower and our bathroom sink both work now!] Today there is freezing rain rattling against the windows and I'm working. Have some links.

1. I have known for years that Powell and Pressburger's Oh . . . Rosalinda!! (1955) is widely considered a hot mess of Technicolor and Strauss, but I am still overjoyed to discover it's finally gotten a restoration and with any luck, region codes being what they are, it will play at some art house where I can actually get to it, since it remains one of the very few of their movies I've never seen. This gifset only confirms my feelings. I hope Anton Walbrook and Michael Redgrave were having an affair.

2. I had never seen the video for Annie Lennox's "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." As soon as the guisers with their top hats and drum and their masks of the moon showed up, I e-mailed

nineweaving so fast.

3. Courtesy of a whole bunch of people: Amanda Marcotte, "Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda." "The very fact that they're presented as harmless fluff makes it all the more insidious, the way they work to enforce very narrow, white, heteronormative, sexist, provincial ideas of what constitutes 'normal.' It's easy to spot fascist propaganda when it's goose-stepping Pepe-the-frog memes. It's a lot harder to notice how it's working when it's tied up in Christmas cheer and suggesting grinchhood of anyone who questions the rigidity of its worldview."

4. I like this photo of Barbara Wright taken by Annemarie Schwarzenbach in 1937. I also like photos of Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

5. Courtesy of

handful_ofdust: a gifset of Peter Cushing as Harry Fordyce in Cash on Demand (1961).

For the last night of Hanukkah, my parents gave me my own print copy of Cyril Hare's Tragedy at Law (1942), which is much better than reading it off the internet thanks to Canadian copyright law.

spatch just texted me that Norma Tanega and Neil Innes have both died, which is not better at all.

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"Solicitors who had fought shy of the learned Miss Hilda Matthewson, barrisrer-at-law, competed for invitations to the cocktail parties and dinners given by the smart Mrs Barber."

I don't think Hilda is at all a nice person, but then neither is Barber, and there must have been something about her in her youth to attract Pettigrew in what he refers to as "a long and hopeless pursuit." I think the way in which she has to completely subsume herself into her husband's career, gets laughed at for it behind her back and then risks losing everything because of his idiocy and murders him in a last bid to save what she can is a terrible illustration of how she's been warped by having literally no other outlet.

a terrible illustration of how she's been warped by having literally no other outlet.

I agree with this entirely.

"Limitation of actions was always a subject that interested me and I made particular study of it."
"What an inhuman brute you always were, Hilda."
"I don't see that there is anything inhuman about being a lawyer."
"There is—for a woman, at all events. Tell me, was that what you married William for—so as to become a successful lawyer by proxy?"

And that's her brother, to her face. (If it's true, Pettigrew would never have worked as a match; he's always been more about failing on his own terms. I'm not sure it is; the narrative tells us only that after her marriage she went on working brilliantly for her husband as if she were still his pupil, so that his career is effectively a collaboration for which she can never, except in the most backhanded terms, receive credit. She could at least stay close to the thing she loved. It wouldn't be enough.) I read this novel for the first time last December and mostly went on to read all of the other Pettigrew mysteries, of which I liked With a Bare Bodkin (1946) and He Should Have Died Hereafter (1958) next best; this time it made me think of Craig's Wife (1936) which I had seen in the interim. You can't live through a partner any more than you can through a child. I do think the novel knows she shouldn't have had to.

Pettigrew might have worked in a world where they were both able to have careers at the Bar, where she could have been QC and done long complex firm frauds, and he'd have done something less well-paid, but been honestly proud of her success.

and he'd have done something less well-paid, but been honestly proud of her success.

I think he would have been, too.

There sometimes is something a bit Austenesque about Hare, and I think the idea that people can be marred by bad marriages and put on the right path by good ones is part of it. It's not (in either case) the "reform a rake" trope, but it is about becoming one's worse or better self; take the comment in Mansfield Park about Frances Price (Snr) being just as good material for being a baronet's lady as Maria Bertram (Snr) but that Mrs Norris would have been a far more respectable mother of ten on a narrow income.

Well, nothing ever comes when you want it to

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Re: Tragedy at Law