A solar eclipse, a payphone call

[sovay]

I have moved on to taking the cloud cover very personally, especially since last night when I had access to binoculars but not the telescope the sky was clear in all the right places; my hands are not as steady as a tripod. I am also annoyed that I have regained sufficient stamina for walks of several miles, but if I spend ten minutes behind the wheel of a car, I am useless for the rest of the day. Have some links-ish.

1. It feels disingenuous to say that my antisemitism tolerance really has dropped in the last few years, but I decided last night to watch the first episode of Callan (1967–72) because my mother and I have been talking about it—she's not confident she saw much if any of it, but she has always been the most media-oriented person in this family and she really likes Edward Woodward—and it was handily on YouTube in all its 405-line telerecorded crunchiness and it turned out that the plot revolves around the identification and capture of a Nazi war criminal in hiding. This was not in itself a dealbreaker, cf. my missing no chance to champion Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966). But the particulars of Callan's assignment require him to work with the Israelis who want the one-time Obersturmbannführer for an Eichmann-style trial; we meet two of the team. One is a traumatized survivor, introduced praying and still terrified of the man who coldly broke his ribs after he was taken from the camps for forced labor at the Mittelwerk. The other is a kibbutz-bred young agent, vengeance-bent and humorless; his inflexible pursuit of a man whose worst crimes were committed before he was born is regarded by Callan with jaundice at best. "Twenty-three years ago . . ." Leaned on by an impatient Avram to follow his orders, he throws the Jew a mocking Hitler salute. I watched another scene or two and just sort of tapped out on the episode. There was other plot going on, but selkie had just been talking about how not to teach the Holocaust and it felt uncomfortably close to a primer: the old generation of pathetic victims, the new generation of self-righteous perpetrators, how very Old Testament to cling to a grudge a quarter-century on. I didn't even get to find out if the title—"The Good Ones Are All Dead"—was some sort of riff on Viktor Frankl. I may try waiting a little and then skipping to the next unburninated episode on the theory that they can't all be topically about ex-Nazis. Tragically, now that I've seen him out from behind a beard, I seem to think that Russell Hunter had a really interesting face.

2. Speaking of interesting faces, because I have been futzing around with a telescope, I wondered what Burn Gorman had been up to lately. The answer seems to be playing the creep in a male-gaze thriller. Which I may yet try to track down because it looks like a contemporary variation on a kind of disbelieved woman's picture that I have mostly seen in noir or proto-giallo, but now this feels even more like the classic Hollywood character actor problem where two or three times—if lucky—you get to see them in a role as versatile and adorable as they deserve and otherwise it's all third psychopath from the left.

3. Speaking of classic Hollywood, I don't want to see Andrew Dominik's Blonde (2022). I am especially disappointed because I loved the same director's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): I could describe it best and most accurately by comparing it to the historical fantasias of Angela Carter. I didn't expect him to fuck up catastrophically trying to get inside another American myth.

I am seriously honored to be a column favorite at Reading the Weird.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I have vague memories of a book I once bounced off of because it was about the post-Civil War period and the narrative seemed to state that the angry ex-slave was Too Angry and the forgiving ex-slave made the Right Choice.

Also your posts are always so rich and fascinating.

*blows at the sky to clear it*

[thisbluespirit]

I am seriously honored to be a column favorite at Reading the Weird.

A column with great taste! <3

but I decided last night to watch the first episode of Callan (1967–72) because my mother and I have been talking about it

I've been trying to watch the surviving 60s Callan eps over the summer, funnily enough. I have managed to get beyond that, but started with A Magnum For Schneider, which sort of has the same plot but a different scenario (Schneider is an arms dealer, I think). I'm trying to remember what happened after for you: I don't think you'd have enjoyed it much more, even if Callan can ever be described as enjoyable! (I think Callan wanted to be sure his target was the right person before he acted and got more compelling evidence that he was, so was prepared to go through with it, but at the end Frankl was, ok, take me, I deserve everything and Callan let him have his cyanide pill, because he couldn't be responsible for torture as well as killing, and then hates himself for that as well? So, yeah.) I mean, having watched more, Callan hates and mistrusts everyone who asks him to kill someone whoever they are, (because who asks you to kill people, I suppose?) and that's the whole series, but unfortunately anti-semitism is still among the many hazards of watching TV of this era, much as I wish I could say otherwise. (It's no good hoping for women to do anything other than die in Callan either, not as yet, but it is at least still better on that front than The Professionals's S1 a decade later.) It is a compelling but grim show, and Edward Woodward is very good in it, the way everybody said, and the whole Callan-Lonely and Callan-Meres relationships are genuinely interesting.

But, in short, if you did want to jump to the others to try a less offensive one, while my head was very blurry, there weren't any more holocaust or Israeli intelligence-related plots as far as I've got (the start of "Heir Apparent"), just British Intelligence being shady and the Cold War, and Callan hating everything and everyone except Lonely.

if lucky—you get to see them in a role as versatile and adorable as they deserve and otherwise it's all third psychopath from the left.

LOL, that really is Burn Gorman, I think! I keep only seeing him being a creep! XD

[yhlee]

May the weather break in your favor soon!!

[troisoiseaux]

this feels even more like the classic Hollywood character actor problem where two or three times—if lucky—you get to see them in a role as versatile and adorable as they deserve and otherwise it's all third psychopath from the left.

Burn Gorman does play Bad Guys well but he ALSO plays non-bad guys well and I wish he was cast as them more often!!! (Speaking of which-- Pacific Rim was the first time I actually saw him in something where I recognized him, but I've realized retrospectively that he'd been in a bunch of movies I'd seen before that, including Penelope, where he has a small role as a journalist and an American accent???)

[ashlyme]

It's been much the same here with cloud-cover. There's a very good reason why the UK never produced its own Maxfield Parrish!

*Hugs* re: Callan. I suppose it's too much to hope that someone called him out on it. (Hang on, is that Russell Hunter as in "The Robots of Death"?)

Everything I've read about Blonde puts me off watching it. I heard an interview with Dominik the other evening and putting it bluntly he came across as utterly fucking clueless.

[alexxkay]

Leaned on by an impatient Avram

My brain initially parsed that as "an impatient Aryan", which read rather differently to what you meant. Though I guess not far off from what the writers meant :-(

[aurumcalendula]

I have no desire to see Dominik's movie, but I'm vaguely curious how the 2001 tv movie adaptation (which I haven't seen either) compares to it.

(ETA: if this article is accurate, the 2001 one sounds more interesting)

I am seriously honored to be a column favorite at Reading the Weird.

Congrats!