Thank you for this thoughtful, beautifully written obituary. (Also the links.)
You are very welcome for both.
"They moved in to kill - I was playing it as the poet laureate."
There's a variation on that in the interview I linked: "Orson had from either side of the stage this crowd moving like a scissors in on this solo figure. And he thinks it's because of his popularity as a poet." I suspect this was a story Lloyd told often, and I love that it gives such a good picture of the scene, since all that seems to survive otherwise is the one photograph. "Poet laureate" is really poignant, though. A street poet delighted to find himself with so many admirers until they tear him apart.
"He moved these guys in one by one - and the lighting was fantastic - blood red - the set was red too."
That's nice. The memoir includes details of the scene's choreography ("As I made a large semi-circle up and around to stage right, I became aware they were closing in on me, and I returned to the center where the poems had been thrown, increasingly apprehensive that the outcome could be terrible") but not the lighting, which sounds extremely effective.
They tried to recreate it for the film Me and Orson Welles, which revolves round this Julius Caesar production, but I don't believe the impact came across.
I am intrigued that someone tried to restage the scene at all, but it would take a hell of a cast and a director to pull it off.
(For the record, I just read your reviews of both the book and the film and your objection to the insertion of a fictional character in place of a real person makes perfect sense to me; it's the reason that even though I imprinted on Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code (1986) in high school, I loved one aspect of it a lot less as soon as I learned anything about Joan Clarke. There's just enough of her reality left in the fiction of Pat Green for the character to feel like a disservice not just to Clarke personally, but to the complexities of history. Green pines unrequitedly for Turing, approaches him romantically and is gently rebuffed as if she doesn't understand what his sexuality means for their relationship, disappears from mathematics into domesticity as soon as the war is done. Clarke was actually engaged to Turing over the summer of 1941. He had done the proposing: they were fast friends who had bonded over cryptanalysis, chess, and natural history, went to the cinema and took long bicycle rides together, could talk about everything from mathematics to knitting. He famously told her of his "homosexual tendencies" the day after his proposal and while it made her wary of their chances as a couple, she was neither upset nor entirely surprised by the information. As far as I can tell, they both seem to have hoped their mutual liking would be enough to make an exception to his orientation. He wanted some aspects of a married life very much; he wanted children (and did not expect Clarke to leave her war work to bear them) and he wanted to share his life with someone with whom he could always think and talk. And at the end of the summer, as it became clear to him that his admiration of her brilliance and affection for her as a person was not suddenly going to convert into sexual desire for her as a woman, he decided that it would not be fair to her to go through with the marriage and broke the engagement off. I have always thought that admirable. They stayed friends for the rest of his life. She did marry after the war: a retired army officer whom she met at GCHQ, having stayed in the field of cryptanalysis until her retirement in the late '70's freed her up to do some very well-regarded work in early modern numismatics. I understand the value of Pat Green as a dramatic device: another outsider who's a critical resource in times of national crisis and then dismissed with the return to "normal," her post-war compliance a cautionary tale against which the hero's nonconformity stands out all the more. I just find Clarke so much more interesting and especially in the wake of The Imitation Game (2014), I fear few people will know how much more so than her fictional counterparts or substitutes. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.)
You're right, he'd have made an excellent Bernstein, too. And I really must watch Saboteur, I haven't yet.
spatch and I caught it on TCM last fall and it's just really good. It's a wrong-man thriller in travelogue episodes à la The 39 Steps (1935), but it doesn't feel jerky or derivative and it's grounded in the ordinary world—the location shooting helps, but so does the casting; the original choices of Stanwyck and Cooper would have been too obviously A-list, whereas Cummings and Lane look like people you might actually run into, especially when one of them is a small-time model—in a way I don't always associate with Hitchcock and really enjoy at the same time as it can accommodate wonderful images like a fire signaled by black smoke billowing expressionistically across corrugated steel. There's a nice running thread of nobodies and marginalized people sticking together and a really common-sense failure of successful bluffing, in that it convinces the heroine as well the bad guys that the hero's on their side. I was surprised by how much I liked it, not just because of Norman Lloyd.
no subject
You are very welcome for both.
"They moved in to kill - I was playing it as the poet laureate."
There's a variation on that in the interview I linked: "Orson had from either side of the stage this crowd moving like a scissors in on this solo figure. And he thinks it's because of his popularity as a poet." I suspect this was a story Lloyd told often, and I love that it gives such a good picture of the scene, since all that seems to survive otherwise is the one photograph. "Poet laureate" is really poignant, though. A street poet delighted to find himself with so many admirers until they tear him apart.
"He moved these guys in one by one - and the lighting was fantastic - blood red - the set was red too."
That's nice. The memoir includes details of the scene's choreography ("As I made a large semi-circle up and around to stage right, I became aware they were closing in on me, and I returned to the center where the poems had been thrown, increasingly apprehensive that the outcome could be terrible") but not the lighting, which sounds extremely effective.
They tried to recreate it for the film Me and Orson Welles, which revolves round this Julius Caesar production, but I don't believe the impact came across.
I am intrigued that someone tried to restage the scene at all, but it would take a hell of a cast and a director to pull it off.
(For the record, I just read your reviews of both the book and the film and your objection to the insertion of a fictional character in place of a real person makes perfect sense to me; it's the reason that even though I imprinted on Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code (1986) in high school, I loved one aspect of it a lot less as soon as I learned anything about Joan Clarke. There's just enough of her reality left in the fiction of Pat Green for the character to feel like a disservice not just to Clarke personally, but to the complexities of history. Green pines unrequitedly for Turing, approaches him romantically and is gently rebuffed as if she doesn't understand what his sexuality means for their relationship, disappears from mathematics into domesticity as soon as the war is done. Clarke was actually engaged to Turing over the summer of 1941. He had done the proposing: they were fast friends who had bonded over cryptanalysis, chess, and natural history, went to the cinema and took long bicycle rides together, could talk about everything from mathematics to knitting. He famously told her of his "homosexual tendencies" the day after his proposal and while it made her wary of their chances as a couple, she was neither upset nor entirely surprised by the information. As far as I can tell, they both seem to have hoped their mutual liking would be enough to make an exception to his orientation. He wanted some aspects of a married life very much; he wanted children (and did not expect Clarke to leave her war work to bear them) and he wanted to share his life with someone with whom he could always think and talk. And at the end of the summer, as it became clear to him that his admiration of her brilliance and affection for her as a person was not suddenly going to convert into sexual desire for her as a woman, he decided that it would not be fair to her to go through with the marriage and broke the engagement off. I have always thought that admirable. They stayed friends for the rest of his life. She did marry after the war: a retired army officer whom she met at GCHQ, having stayed in the field of cryptanalysis until her retirement in the late '70's freed her up to do some very well-regarded work in early modern numismatics. I understand the value of Pat Green as a dramatic device: another outsider who's a critical resource in times of national crisis and then dismissed with the return to "normal," her post-war compliance a cautionary tale against which the hero's nonconformity stands out all the more. I just find Clarke so much more interesting and especially in the wake of The Imitation Game (2014), I fear few people will know how much more so than her fictional counterparts or substitutes. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.)
You're right, he'd have made an excellent Bernstein, too. And I really must watch Saboteur, I haven't yet.