![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
And you want cash, don't you?
Because I was thinking about antisemitism recently, I was reminded of Mr. Tsaldouris.
Mr. Tsaldouris exists in a short, ambiguous, memorable scene invented for the second act of Anthony Pelissier's The Rocking Horse Winner (1949), a controlled experiment in the modern middle-class supernatural which might have set the tone for British art-horror in the next decade had it not alienated more audiences than it attracted with the faithfully weirder dimensions of its psycho-fiscal conte cruel. Like its source material of D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1926), the film documents the doomed efforts of a child to fill the void of materialism where a parent's love should be, but it goes farther into the visibly supernatural, the sexual, and the inescapably capitalist, all under a brittle well-made surface that's as neat a job of false advertising as the gentility of a family that has no luck; it rhymes where it might be expected to explain and does not confuse a moral with the hope of expiation. From the moment all the money-fretting of the adults in his life flashed over into a haunting, condensing up the stairs to whisper hydra-headed through the nursery as if seeking a suitable medium, there was never a good ending for a child as neglected and sensitive as John Howard Davies' Paul Grahame, freezing mid-play as the command hisses from between the staring teeth of his Christmas-new rocking horse: "There must be more money." No one else in the household hears it, not his younger sisters still sheltered by their nanny, his worldly uncle or his handsomely feckless father or his well-meaning confidant of a handyman, not even his mother in her fever of expensive tastes, whose frustrated words they were first. No one else can ride a gift horse as far as the breathless, intangible region "where there's luck," translated with the Faustian innocence of a horse-loving eleven-year-old into surefire racing tips. Singhalese, Sanderino, Daffodil, Lively Spark, Malabar . . . No one tries, or knows, to stop him. The house goes on whispering, Paul riding hag-ridden, hell-bent. Is a childhood any less lost for ten shillings than £80,000? The harder he works to satisfy his mother, the faster his winnings run away between her fingers in her fury to resist the style to which she must realistically become accustomed, whence Mr. Tsaldouris.
As well as directing, Pelissier adapted the script for The Rocking Horse Winner himself and almost all of his elaborations on Lawrence have recognizable roots in the text, however far and imaginatively the film departs from them. Courtesy of a line about the hazards of "a gambling family," Hugh Sinclair's Richard Grahame plays cards almost as badly as he holds jobs or honors IOUs; inspired by the resentment of "the poor members of the family," Ronald Squire's Oscar Cresswell does not merely stand as prosperous counterpoint, he serves as his spendthrift sister's long-suffering trustee. The cool yet faintly distracted air of Valerie Hobson's Hester Grahame may indicate that she shares her original's consciousness that "at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love." If so, this maternal vacancy makes room in the film for the nurturing efforts of John Mills' Bassett, who can in turn be represented as an ex-jockey—or at least a stable lad who once rode to win, which is horsemanship sufficient to awe Paul—because his literary counterpart was characterized as "a perfect blade of the 'turf'." It's a sort of close reading as shadowcast. By the same strategy, while in the short story Paul only asks anxiously, "You know people send mother writs, don't you, uncle?" onscreen we actually see one served, acid-etching the cycles of addiction and avoidance whose unrestrained consequences spur the normally, cynically phlegmatic Oscar to declare in a rare burst of temper, "You've made such an incredible muddle between the two of you, it'll be a miracle in my opinion if the estate isn't declared bankrupt!" Hester rebounds from the delivery of the writ into a defiant, costly shopping trip for which the bill shortly comes due in the form of a bailiff propping up the mantel and refusing to leave without the forty pounds specified in his order for possession, but forty pounds are nowhere to be found in the lavishly furnished, emptily whispering house, so while Paul is enjoying his first day at the races with an indulgent, intrigued Uncle Oscar, his mother ventures into the slums of London for a much less refreshing exercise in the achievement of spot cash. It is a sharp comedown, not just the social scale but the stairs to the basement where the tailor and dealer in used goods keeps his cramped shop. Even just seated over his paper, he presents a disreputable and potentially threatening figure in his dingy shirt with its half-rolled sleeves and sprung collar, his lean face variously obscured by his morning stubble and the smoke of his cigarette, the pale reflections of his spectacles and his undoffed hat. A pug wrapped in a woollen shawl snuffles in the crook of his arm. At the entrance of Hester, conspicuously misplaced with her nervous arrogance and her expensive valise, he forestalls her explanation and draws the blind, reinforcing the impression of illicit dealings and casting the shelves and counters of secondhand garments into shadows as stark as the bottom line. His appraisal of her fashionable shoes and dresses—she balks at anything so vulgar as pricing the merchandise herself—is a professionally dismissive "Twenty quid the lot." She protests; he is adamantly indifferent. To be lectured by her brother in her own home was intolerable enough, but to be reduced, literally descending to the mercy of this subterranean sharper registers on Hester as the ultimate degradation. She salvages a little of her pride by refusing to count the notes she is obliged to accept from him, but Mr. Tsaldouris remains the obvious gainer of their exchange; she returns home as drained and numb as if he's exacted more from her than her comforting illusion of the leisured class, a half-pound of flesh, perhaps. The allusion is not out of reach. The character is nowhere explicitly identified as Jewish, his name is more recognizably Greek, but he's in the rag trade and he's played by the Austrian Jewish Charles Goldner. If he isn't a pawnbroker or a fence, he carries the shady, vulturous aura of one. By the time the chic, blonde woman emerges wearily into the sunlight where a mob of children scramble for the sixpence that was all she could afford to undertip her driver, the film seems to have checked all the codes of Dickensian antisemitism or at least a near-miss with T. S. Eliot. And yet there's a complicating gesture, which occurs at just about the midpoint of their interaction. Stung into attempting a belated, unsuccessful counteroffer to the tailor's lowball insult, Hester flares indignantly, "You're trying to cheat me!" Glancing up from his racing form with a swift, unexpected smile, Mr. Tsaldouris replies, "Naturally."
It's the smile that makes the line work. It's not gloating, it's not greedy, it's not even unfriendly, as curt as his side of the conversation has been until then: it's not kind, but it's honest. To a viewer who doesn't find this wiry-haired man with his Mitteleuropean accent so foreign and frightening, it may even possess a certain chutzpadik charm. As if the callout has cleared the air between them, Mr. Tsaldouris addresses Hester frankly, without wheedling or hostility. "How much you got to have? I know you want the money quick: that's why you come to me. And you want cash, don't you? No cheque. Cash, today. How much?" He does, of course, proceed to cheat her outrageously, but she was fairly warned and she wouldn't play the game; even at the stakes of a bailiff to tea, she sticks so exclusively to the objective of her debt that she fails to account for the taxi she carelessly left with its meter ticking on the street outside. Hondel a little, sweetheart! Everyone who isn't second-generation super-rich has to do a deal sometime. I admit it is difficult for me to be fair to Hester in this scene: the distress and urgency of her dilemma notwithstanding, her distaste at interacting with Mr. Tsaldouris gives off a faint flavor of Lovecraft in Brooklyn. But I am not so sure that the film, despite the urban grotesquerie of the interlude, intends its audience to share fully in her feelings. Mr. Tsaldouris may be associated with money in its grubbiest and most desperate aspects, but the really unforgivable thing about him is not that Hester is forced to his level, but that she is forced to the recognition that his level is real. No amount of social pretension can soften the facts of her errand. Implicit in the aspiration of social mobility is the threat of falling the other way. The urchins scrapping on the sidewalk for spurned small change rhyme uneasily with the young carollers receiving similar largesse from Richard on Christmas Eve. The successful settling of the bailiff is bracketed by the incurring of smaller, meaner debts, the taxi fare out of the cook's housekeeping money, the bailiff's fee on last-minute loan from the nanny, which the audience may be far more skeptical of seeing repaid. Hester goes about selling her possessions so ineptly, it is obvious that she never has before had to involve herself in the demeaning business of earning as opposed to spending. Her husband has always worked in some office or other; her brother handles the niceties of the trust; she asks no questions about a timely windfall of £5000 even when the pretext of a bequest from a distant, mysterious relative is scarcely more credible than the reality of a legal shell game worked out at her own son's request. She prefers her money zipless, discreetly sourced without visible toil. But who doesn't? Not Richard, a sucker for the shortcut of a flutter among friends. Not Oscar, buying his way into the miniature syndicate of Paul's predictions with an amused handshake of "honour bright." Not even decent, worried Bassett, whose love for the fragile, secretively driven child does not stop him from dutifully placing bets so long as the boy's long shots keep coming in: "It's just as if he had it from heaven." We all live in the same haunted house and it whispers incessantly that not to be casually rich is the worst crime of all. The dreadful truth about Richard and Hester Grahame is that if they could restrain their habits enough to live, as her brother acidly suggests, "not within your income, which would be asking too much, but at least within calling distance of it," they would be merely well-off. They would not be poor. They wouldn't have to hock their clothes to stave off bill collectors, their children wouldn't crowd like cats around taxis in the street, but neither would they belong to the breezily affluent echelons of the upper crust that can afford not to care about money, not least the indignities of where it comes from. Living in a kind of hectic dream above their means, they belong only so long as the money buoys them up and the dry grey street of shabby terraces and seedy trades runs out endlessly ahead of Hester like the future they are facing if its lucky tide ever drops. It is an ordinary street, not an expressionist nightmare. That is reserved for the upper-middle-class home.
I do not want to underrate this film as a work of supernatural horror. Just psychologically, it is remarkably and acutely upsetting, especially since so much of its tragedy turns on innocence both ways—indifferent exploitation makes a neater moral, but a chain of unwitting complicities leaves more of a wound—but in terms of weird fiction, it is superb at articulating its haunting without ever spelling out its mechanism for the audience. We can fit the available data into an explanation if we feel like it, but it hangs together with child-logic, which is not the same as dream-logic, even if we don't. The strongest clue is the answer given by Paul when asked for the name of the wooden mount he has just been so furiously riding, the nursery blurring and telescoping in his vision as if he is indeed covering a much greater distance than the creaking arc of the rockers should allow: "He hasn't got a name . . . Well, he's got different names. Last week he was called Sanderino." The name entertains his uncle, because it belongs to the horse that just won at Ascot; it is assumed that Paul got the news from Bassett with whom he is always talking about racing, although Oscar revealingly grumbles that he didn't hear anything from his former batman and remarks speculatively as the tall, disheveled child is sent off to bed, "Fancy him knowing about Sanderino." In hindsight, knowing that Paul is already whipping the rocking horse to "take [him] where there's luck," it seems far more likely that he is in some precognitive fashion actually riding the races he needs to "know for," the stiff, grinning, painted toy assuming the identity of each winner beneath him. What horse-obsessed child wouldn't race at Ascot or the National or the Derby in their imagination? The house was already permeated with the intertwined obsessions of his parents with money and luck. The separate, simultaneous arrivals of the rocking horse and Bassett gave him something to ride and someone to teach him how. I call the results a haunting because of how it inhabits the physical architecture as well as the emotional space of the house, but it might equally be interpreted as a fatal crossing of dreams. Once activated, it is as unstoppable as human devotion or hunger and there is nothing like an exorcism in the final shot of the skeletal horse blackening in a sheet of flames, the unfinished, dying fall of strings in the score like Bassett's parting words: "You won't never see the end of it, ma'am. Nor won't I. As long as ever we'll live, we'll remember and we'll know just what it is was done." I do not envy whoever takes the house after the Grahames have left it. If it is still standing, I would not move in.
The Rocking Horse Winner was one of Mills' two forays into producing, the other being the same year's The History of Mr. Polly (1949), also adapted and directed by Pelissier. Neither was a success at the box office; in the case of the wholly delightful Mr. Polly I have no idea what happened, but in this case I suspect audiences were no more prepared for its uncompromising dark fairy tale than for the Napoleonic Gothic of Thorold Dickinson's The Queen of Spades (1949), with which this film makes a kind of triptych along with Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948). It was photographed as restlessly as a poltergeist by Desmond Dickinson and scored by the ubiquitous William Alwyn as if the music itself is closing in. Even after a second viewing, I have still not settled my mind on the question of Mr. Tsaldouris except that Goldner does have a nice smile and I appreciate the moment the audience can see him as a person, even if to Hester he remains a sigil of financial despair. Next time, lady, make an offer first. This luck brought to you by my natural backers at Patreon.
Mr. Tsaldouris exists in a short, ambiguous, memorable scene invented for the second act of Anthony Pelissier's The Rocking Horse Winner (1949), a controlled experiment in the modern middle-class supernatural which might have set the tone for British art-horror in the next decade had it not alienated more audiences than it attracted with the faithfully weirder dimensions of its psycho-fiscal conte cruel. Like its source material of D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1926), the film documents the doomed efforts of a child to fill the void of materialism where a parent's love should be, but it goes farther into the visibly supernatural, the sexual, and the inescapably capitalist, all under a brittle well-made surface that's as neat a job of false advertising as the gentility of a family that has no luck; it rhymes where it might be expected to explain and does not confuse a moral with the hope of expiation. From the moment all the money-fretting of the adults in his life flashed over into a haunting, condensing up the stairs to whisper hydra-headed through the nursery as if seeking a suitable medium, there was never a good ending for a child as neglected and sensitive as John Howard Davies' Paul Grahame, freezing mid-play as the command hisses from between the staring teeth of his Christmas-new rocking horse: "There must be more money." No one else in the household hears it, not his younger sisters still sheltered by their nanny, his worldly uncle or his handsomely feckless father or his well-meaning confidant of a handyman, not even his mother in her fever of expensive tastes, whose frustrated words they were first. No one else can ride a gift horse as far as the breathless, intangible region "where there's luck," translated with the Faustian innocence of a horse-loving eleven-year-old into surefire racing tips. Singhalese, Sanderino, Daffodil, Lively Spark, Malabar . . . No one tries, or knows, to stop him. The house goes on whispering, Paul riding hag-ridden, hell-bent. Is a childhood any less lost for ten shillings than £80,000? The harder he works to satisfy his mother, the faster his winnings run away between her fingers in her fury to resist the style to which she must realistically become accustomed, whence Mr. Tsaldouris.
As well as directing, Pelissier adapted the script for The Rocking Horse Winner himself and almost all of his elaborations on Lawrence have recognizable roots in the text, however far and imaginatively the film departs from them. Courtesy of a line about the hazards of "a gambling family," Hugh Sinclair's Richard Grahame plays cards almost as badly as he holds jobs or honors IOUs; inspired by the resentment of "the poor members of the family," Ronald Squire's Oscar Cresswell does not merely stand as prosperous counterpoint, he serves as his spendthrift sister's long-suffering trustee. The cool yet faintly distracted air of Valerie Hobson's Hester Grahame may indicate that she shares her original's consciousness that "at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love." If so, this maternal vacancy makes room in the film for the nurturing efforts of John Mills' Bassett, who can in turn be represented as an ex-jockey—or at least a stable lad who once rode to win, which is horsemanship sufficient to awe Paul—because his literary counterpart was characterized as "a perfect blade of the 'turf'." It's a sort of close reading as shadowcast. By the same strategy, while in the short story Paul only asks anxiously, "You know people send mother writs, don't you, uncle?" onscreen we actually see one served, acid-etching the cycles of addiction and avoidance whose unrestrained consequences spur the normally, cynically phlegmatic Oscar to declare in a rare burst of temper, "You've made such an incredible muddle between the two of you, it'll be a miracle in my opinion if the estate isn't declared bankrupt!" Hester rebounds from the delivery of the writ into a defiant, costly shopping trip for which the bill shortly comes due in the form of a bailiff propping up the mantel and refusing to leave without the forty pounds specified in his order for possession, but forty pounds are nowhere to be found in the lavishly furnished, emptily whispering house, so while Paul is enjoying his first day at the races with an indulgent, intrigued Uncle Oscar, his mother ventures into the slums of London for a much less refreshing exercise in the achievement of spot cash. It is a sharp comedown, not just the social scale but the stairs to the basement where the tailor and dealer in used goods keeps his cramped shop. Even just seated over his paper, he presents a disreputable and potentially threatening figure in his dingy shirt with its half-rolled sleeves and sprung collar, his lean face variously obscured by his morning stubble and the smoke of his cigarette, the pale reflections of his spectacles and his undoffed hat. A pug wrapped in a woollen shawl snuffles in the crook of his arm. At the entrance of Hester, conspicuously misplaced with her nervous arrogance and her expensive valise, he forestalls her explanation and draws the blind, reinforcing the impression of illicit dealings and casting the shelves and counters of secondhand garments into shadows as stark as the bottom line. His appraisal of her fashionable shoes and dresses—she balks at anything so vulgar as pricing the merchandise herself—is a professionally dismissive "Twenty quid the lot." She protests; he is adamantly indifferent. To be lectured by her brother in her own home was intolerable enough, but to be reduced, literally descending to the mercy of this subterranean sharper registers on Hester as the ultimate degradation. She salvages a little of her pride by refusing to count the notes she is obliged to accept from him, but Mr. Tsaldouris remains the obvious gainer of their exchange; she returns home as drained and numb as if he's exacted more from her than her comforting illusion of the leisured class, a half-pound of flesh, perhaps. The allusion is not out of reach. The character is nowhere explicitly identified as Jewish, his name is more recognizably Greek, but he's in the rag trade and he's played by the Austrian Jewish Charles Goldner. If he isn't a pawnbroker or a fence, he carries the shady, vulturous aura of one. By the time the chic, blonde woman emerges wearily into the sunlight where a mob of children scramble for the sixpence that was all she could afford to undertip her driver, the film seems to have checked all the codes of Dickensian antisemitism or at least a near-miss with T. S. Eliot. And yet there's a complicating gesture, which occurs at just about the midpoint of their interaction. Stung into attempting a belated, unsuccessful counteroffer to the tailor's lowball insult, Hester flares indignantly, "You're trying to cheat me!" Glancing up from his racing form with a swift, unexpected smile, Mr. Tsaldouris replies, "Naturally."
It's the smile that makes the line work. It's not gloating, it's not greedy, it's not even unfriendly, as curt as his side of the conversation has been until then: it's not kind, but it's honest. To a viewer who doesn't find this wiry-haired man with his Mitteleuropean accent so foreign and frightening, it may even possess a certain chutzpadik charm. As if the callout has cleared the air between them, Mr. Tsaldouris addresses Hester frankly, without wheedling or hostility. "How much you got to have? I know you want the money quick: that's why you come to me. And you want cash, don't you? No cheque. Cash, today. How much?" He does, of course, proceed to cheat her outrageously, but she was fairly warned and she wouldn't play the game; even at the stakes of a bailiff to tea, she sticks so exclusively to the objective of her debt that she fails to account for the taxi she carelessly left with its meter ticking on the street outside. Hondel a little, sweetheart! Everyone who isn't second-generation super-rich has to do a deal sometime. I admit it is difficult for me to be fair to Hester in this scene: the distress and urgency of her dilemma notwithstanding, her distaste at interacting with Mr. Tsaldouris gives off a faint flavor of Lovecraft in Brooklyn. But I am not so sure that the film, despite the urban grotesquerie of the interlude, intends its audience to share fully in her feelings. Mr. Tsaldouris may be associated with money in its grubbiest and most desperate aspects, but the really unforgivable thing about him is not that Hester is forced to his level, but that she is forced to the recognition that his level is real. No amount of social pretension can soften the facts of her errand. Implicit in the aspiration of social mobility is the threat of falling the other way. The urchins scrapping on the sidewalk for spurned small change rhyme uneasily with the young carollers receiving similar largesse from Richard on Christmas Eve. The successful settling of the bailiff is bracketed by the incurring of smaller, meaner debts, the taxi fare out of the cook's housekeeping money, the bailiff's fee on last-minute loan from the nanny, which the audience may be far more skeptical of seeing repaid. Hester goes about selling her possessions so ineptly, it is obvious that she never has before had to involve herself in the demeaning business of earning as opposed to spending. Her husband has always worked in some office or other; her brother handles the niceties of the trust; she asks no questions about a timely windfall of £5000 even when the pretext of a bequest from a distant, mysterious relative is scarcely more credible than the reality of a legal shell game worked out at her own son's request. She prefers her money zipless, discreetly sourced without visible toil. But who doesn't? Not Richard, a sucker for the shortcut of a flutter among friends. Not Oscar, buying his way into the miniature syndicate of Paul's predictions with an amused handshake of "honour bright." Not even decent, worried Bassett, whose love for the fragile, secretively driven child does not stop him from dutifully placing bets so long as the boy's long shots keep coming in: "It's just as if he had it from heaven." We all live in the same haunted house and it whispers incessantly that not to be casually rich is the worst crime of all. The dreadful truth about Richard and Hester Grahame is that if they could restrain their habits enough to live, as her brother acidly suggests, "not within your income, which would be asking too much, but at least within calling distance of it," they would be merely well-off. They would not be poor. They wouldn't have to hock their clothes to stave off bill collectors, their children wouldn't crowd like cats around taxis in the street, but neither would they belong to the breezily affluent echelons of the upper crust that can afford not to care about money, not least the indignities of where it comes from. Living in a kind of hectic dream above their means, they belong only so long as the money buoys them up and the dry grey street of shabby terraces and seedy trades runs out endlessly ahead of Hester like the future they are facing if its lucky tide ever drops. It is an ordinary street, not an expressionist nightmare. That is reserved for the upper-middle-class home.
I do not want to underrate this film as a work of supernatural horror. Just psychologically, it is remarkably and acutely upsetting, especially since so much of its tragedy turns on innocence both ways—indifferent exploitation makes a neater moral, but a chain of unwitting complicities leaves more of a wound—but in terms of weird fiction, it is superb at articulating its haunting without ever spelling out its mechanism for the audience. We can fit the available data into an explanation if we feel like it, but it hangs together with child-logic, which is not the same as dream-logic, even if we don't. The strongest clue is the answer given by Paul when asked for the name of the wooden mount he has just been so furiously riding, the nursery blurring and telescoping in his vision as if he is indeed covering a much greater distance than the creaking arc of the rockers should allow: "He hasn't got a name . . . Well, he's got different names. Last week he was called Sanderino." The name entertains his uncle, because it belongs to the horse that just won at Ascot; it is assumed that Paul got the news from Bassett with whom he is always talking about racing, although Oscar revealingly grumbles that he didn't hear anything from his former batman and remarks speculatively as the tall, disheveled child is sent off to bed, "Fancy him knowing about Sanderino." In hindsight, knowing that Paul is already whipping the rocking horse to "take [him] where there's luck," it seems far more likely that he is in some precognitive fashion actually riding the races he needs to "know for," the stiff, grinning, painted toy assuming the identity of each winner beneath him. What horse-obsessed child wouldn't race at Ascot or the National or the Derby in their imagination? The house was already permeated with the intertwined obsessions of his parents with money and luck. The separate, simultaneous arrivals of the rocking horse and Bassett gave him something to ride and someone to teach him how. I call the results a haunting because of how it inhabits the physical architecture as well as the emotional space of the house, but it might equally be interpreted as a fatal crossing of dreams. Once activated, it is as unstoppable as human devotion or hunger and there is nothing like an exorcism in the final shot of the skeletal horse blackening in a sheet of flames, the unfinished, dying fall of strings in the score like Bassett's parting words: "You won't never see the end of it, ma'am. Nor won't I. As long as ever we'll live, we'll remember and we'll know just what it is was done." I do not envy whoever takes the house after the Grahames have left it. If it is still standing, I would not move in.
The Rocking Horse Winner was one of Mills' two forays into producing, the other being the same year's The History of Mr. Polly (1949), also adapted and directed by Pelissier. Neither was a success at the box office; in the case of the wholly delightful Mr. Polly I have no idea what happened, but in this case I suspect audiences were no more prepared for its uncompromising dark fairy tale than for the Napoleonic Gothic of Thorold Dickinson's The Queen of Spades (1949), with which this film makes a kind of triptych along with Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948). It was photographed as restlessly as a poltergeist by Desmond Dickinson and scored by the ubiquitous William Alwyn as if the music itself is closing in. Even after a second viewing, I have still not settled my mind on the question of Mr. Tsaldouris except that Goldner does have a nice smile and I appreciate the moment the audience can see him as a person, even if to Hester he remains a sigil of financial despair. Next time, lady, make an offer first. This luck brought to you by my natural backers at Patreon.
no subject
'If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting.'
The world did not please me, so I changed it! :o)
no subject
I am glad you were able to do so.
no subject
no subject
I still appreciate you leaving it!
no subject
The separate, simultaneous arrivals of the rocking horse and Bassett gave him something to ride and someone to teach him how. I call the results a haunting because of how it inhabits the physical architecture as well as the emotional space of the house, but it might equally be interpreted as a fatal crossing of dreams. Once activated, it is as unstoppable as human devotion or hunger.
That's *brilliant*
And what you say about the honesty of Mr. Tsaldouris:
It's the smile that makes the line work. It's not gloating, it's not greedy, it's not even unfriendly, as curt as his side of the conversation has been until then: it's not kind, but it's honest.
Another point at which I was nodding like a bobble-head was this:
the really unforgivable thing about him is not that Hester is forced to his level, but that she is forced to the recognition that his level is real. No amount of social pretension can soften the facts of her errand. Implicit in the aspiration of social mobility is the threat of falling the other way. --my father used to sometimes talk about that: the perpetual fear of the immigrant family. You can move to Lexington, MA, but Malden or Dorchester are always waiting to welcome you back if the wheel of fortune turns again.
no subject
Thank you! I'm so glad. I'm so tired.
I haven't seen the film (but now I want to), but I've read the short story (or maybe heard it read, can't recall).
The short story is frequently anthologized; it was the sort of instant classic of the supernatural that has never been out of print. I am confident that I read it for the first time in some mid-century collection of horror or weird tales. For years it was the only thing by D. H. Lawrence I had read.
The film looks as though it is on DVD, out of print in this country at least, but the disc can be rented from Netflix and my library system has a copy, so I wish you luck with yours! It's also streaming on Amazon if that helps. I'm not sure why there's never been a Criterion release. If they backed it with The History of Mr. Polly, I would put down money on the spot.
But what's getting me more than your explication of the film and how it works is the themes themselves--this whole review is such a cogent essay on desperation and emptiness and all the false promises of capitalism, with the film as the vehicle.
It is possible that this was not the most emotionally intelligent choice of film to review at the present time, but it wasn't like it's not relevant; what's terrible is how relevant it still is, and the bones of it almost a hundred years old.
Much as I'm happy to support the Patreon and glad this essay at least exists here, I wish it were appearing in the pages of the Atlantic.
*hugs*
And what you say about the honesty of Mr. Tsaldouris
In some ways I rewatched the entire film for that smile.
--my father used to sometimes talk about that: the perpetual fear of the immigrant family. You can move to Lexington, MA, but Malden or Dorchester are always waiting to welcome you back if the wheel of fortune turns again.
Thinking of it in terms of place, too, makes so much sense to me.
no subject
no subject
Thank you. *hugs*
(Also, thinking about antisemitism? What, why on earth?)
Oh, you know. As one does.
(A conversation about literary tropes of antisemitism, specifically.)
no subject
This is a brilliant account.
no subject
Thank you so much.
I had not heard of Mrs. Amworth, but as I see it contains Glynis Johns, I will look for it. I read "The Rocking-Horse Winner" for the first time in seventh grade, because it was included in an anthology from which we were assigned other stories, but personally I would have found it somewhat scarifying to encounter the film. It's not like it doesn't upset me as an adult.