What's your maximum?

[sovay]

I sang in person with A Besere Velt this afternoon. It was the first time since early 2020. It was my first time in two years inside a building with other people who were neither family, doctors, nor an unavoidable, stressful errand. Just being in such close, confined proximity, even masked, was exhausting. I came home and after a thwarted effort to order dinner spatch made me noodles and cheese and hot dogs. I am reminding myself that it was an exhausting week to begin with and I am not in fact too damaged to interact with the world ever again, but it would help not to have an ongoing pandemic that far too many people are invested in pretending is no longer going on. I can't see any hope of resuming what I would have recognized three years ago as a normal life. The city I live in, the state, the country have collectively given up on doing anything but leaving it to the vulnerable to keep themselves some haphazard definition of safe. It's my own fault for missing out if I can't get back into the swing of the economy. My medical conditions, as always, more than ever, are no one's problem but my own.

The problem with The Black Watch (1929), the first sound feature directed by John Ford, is that it is both a sincerely impressive adventure epic full of stunning shots and set pieces and it can be described without exaggeration as a three-way collision between The Four Feathers (1902), "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888), and Journey's End (1928). On the eve of his regiment's embarkation for France in 1914, Victor McLaglen is tapped for a secret mission requiring him to resign under an impression of cowardice and hare off to the Khyber Pass to head off an impending jihad being raised against the Raj by a mysterious woman locally recognized as a goddess. When we meet her and find her played by Myrna Loy with a surprising absence of exoticism beyond some terrible dialogue, I said frivolously that naturally she was white, she was descended from Alexander the Great. I didn't think it would turn out to be the textual explanation. I missed most of the rest of her speech attempting to seduce McLaglen to her cause by invoking a prophecy about empires because I was laughing too hard. In the meantime, the action periodically cuts back to the travails of the Black Watch on the Western Front, once through the supernatural device of a crystal ball. It is, you could say, a trip. I have no idea how closely it hews to the credited source material of Talbot Mundy's King of the Khyber Rifles (1916); I'm a little afraid to try the novel and find out. Outside of the rituals of the regiment and some of the compositions, deep-focus and sharp-lit, I don't know that I would have recognized it as a John Ford movie without being told. A couple of nights ago we watched his bazonkers pre-Code submarine picture Men Without Women (1930) and even with an intertitle problem and no pacing to speak of, it made perfect sense in his catalogue.

We broke for the night about forty-five minutes into Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944). I had last seen the film in high school; I had remembered vividly the transition from theatrical artifice to open-air shooting, but I had somehow forgotten that it does not just open, but spends most of the first two acts in a reenactment of the Globe Theatre of 1600, playing to the groundlings, quick-changing backstage, going on with the show through inclement weather. It approaches the illusion of reality by degrees, trading the wooden O for studio sets as carefully constructed as a book of hours and then, at least as I remember it, sudden real skies and fields and horses printing their proud hoofs right there in Technicolor. When the actors reappear, they look more like the fifteenth century than the cusp of the seventeenth. I don't know which of them I would have recognized the first time around, but now the introduction of the cast is a delightful succession of Leslie Banks, Felix Aylmer, Robert Helpmann, Ernest Thesiger, Robert Newton, Freda Jackson, Leo Genn, Max Adrian . . . It has already gone on the shortlist of our fictional repertory series of movies where immersive, conscious artificiality is a key part of not just their aesthetic but their intellectual and emotional effect. I am finding it a pleasant surprise: I had not responded so strongly to it as an adolescent and I don't remember liking Olivier's Hamlet (1948) or his Richard III (1955) at all. I had also forgotten, if I knew it to begin with, that when the Globe burned down in 1613, it was because of an accident with pyrotechnics, specifically a cannon. That's so Keith Moon, I hope there's a Drunk History about it.

As far as I can tell, I have begun re-reading Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy—I have just moved on to The Eye in the Door (1993)—because it seemed to follow naturally on A Month in the Country (1987). I'm waiting to see if I end up rewatching Jarman's War Requiem (1989), at which point I will probably be studying something.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

I'm glad you got to go out - and sorry it was so tiring! ♥ Unfortunately, wearing the masks does seem to be physically tiring in itself (Or certainly, I find that: I can no longer do things I did before, because of the extra effort involved in, I suppose, ... breathing. /o\) Anyway, may there be more good things and less tiredness sometime soon.

It's been ages since I saw Olivier's Henry V - I really must get hold of it again some time. That was the play I did for my A-Levels and I loved it (much to my surprised). We watched the Oliver, the Branagh, the BBC, and went to Stratford to see it,and honestly I liked them all a lot in different ways.

I had barely even remembered the switch from stage to reality, but it's come back now you've said that! My abiding memory of the Olivier is that it had my favourite Constable of France. He was so beautifully done with the Dauphin and delivered the horse line best of anyone.

(My fave of the recorded versions was the BBC one, so I have been running true to form for just about forever, although tbf, we all actually voted that our favourite. I think because we were studying it and it's the most complete.)

The Stratford performance was excellent, though! The only thing I clearly remember is Tony Britton as Chorus, as a WWI veteran with a poppy in a long dark coat, and the fact that they started the play with that scene about Henry's right to France (or not), but played it as if everyone found it exciting, and it lifted the whole thing immediately. (I looked it up a few years ago, because knowing the date and the Tony Britton thing, I ought to be able to sure of it when I found it - and I saw Iain Glen! It would be more impressive if I could remember anything specifically about his performance, but hey. It's Henry V. If he hadn't been great, we wouldn't have enjoyed it.)

(Coincidentally, I have been watched Laurence Olivier this week as well, as I watched his (MIchael Elliott's) 1983 ITV King Lear, which also has Diana RIgg and Dorothy Tutin in.

[selkie]

Well, I’m no Myrna Loy behind the mountains (the rest of that capsule review is just an eye-crossing kaleidoscope of question mark emojis), but it was good to see you.

[asakiyume]

It has already gone on the shortlist of our fictional repertory series of movies where immersive, conscious artificiality is a key part of not just their aesthetic but their intellectual and emotional effect. --It sounds very cool.

I understand about the in-person singing event being tense and exhausting. :-\

[minoanmiss]

I said frivolously that naturally she was white, she was descended from Alexander the Great. I didn't think it would turn out to be the textual explanation.

I just made quite the noise. :)

Ah, Henry V. I did miss the conspirators from Olivier's production. I hope to see the BBC one one day.

[alexxkay]

The Olivier Henry V will always, for personal hiatory reasons, be tied up with the revelation that one can, in fact, be in a poly relationship and still "cheat".

But more happily, I was in a local SCA production of HV about a decade back. I was doubled as Exeter and Flewellen. I had always thought of F as a goofy, accent-humor character. Which heis -- but inhabiting him showed me so much more.

(That was also the show where, due to insufficiently-rehearsed fights, I had to perform the second half with a hastily-bandaged head. Which, unintuitively, was actually a great experience.)

[oracne]

The city I live in, the state, the country have collectively given up on doing anything but leaving it to the vulnerable to keep themselves some haphazard definition of safe. Yes, this. I feel this as well.

I have never seen Olivier's Henry V, but it sounds like I should.

[pameladean]

I feel the same about the general abandonment of any concern for people who are not healthy. They have themselves been abandoned too, of course, but they are pleased about it.

I am glad you go to sing with people but sorry about everything else.

I rode a bus to an outdoor gathering on Friday. It was exceedingly weird. I double masked and that was fairly unpleasant. I am not sure I will do that again; I got my second booster this afternoon and asked David to drive me rather than doing as I had meant and taking another bus.

I haven't seen Olivier's Henry V in a long time, so long that it is filed in my head along with the movie of The Wizard of Oz, for the transformation you mention, though Oz's is abrupt and Olivier's is slow.

I never like Olivier's choice of what to leave out. Hamlet? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, nowhere to be seen! Not to mention innumerable lines I have to mouth while the actors tumble headlong ahead of themselves. I did like Elsinore in that movie, though. It really is a character as much as anybody else.

I've repeatedly bailed on Olivier's Richard III, at different places. There is just something inimical to Shakespeare about it, though I'd have to watch the whole thing several times to defend this assertion.

P.

[gwynnega]

Myrna Loy's early roles certainly are...interesting. Notably her role as Boris Karloff's daughter in The Mask of Fu Manchu. There's lots of exoticism in that one, but Loy seems to enjoy playing enthusiastic depravity. (Also her role in the proto-slasher Thirteen Women.)