You said the future happened
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newredshoes: Madeline Ashby, "Problems Plus Time: What Creates a Dystopia, Real or Imagined." I enjoyed this essay on G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and I disagree slightly with it; I like its use of the novel to examine the definition of a dystopia, but its interpretation of Auberon Quin as the prototype of a twenty-first-century troll-tyrant elides the thing that actually makes him dangerous, which is not that he's so self-centered, but that he has no center at all. When he's still an unimportant and preposterously frivolous government clerk, he is accurately gauged as "a man who cares for nothing but a joke," which is to say "a dangerous man." Unknowing moments away from his accession by lottery to the throne of England, he makes a rare serious statement, which foretells all the trouble to come and which no one heeds: "Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it . . . Be careful how you suggest things to me." Hence the meta-joke-which-isn't at the center of the novel which makes him inseparable from the start of his lethally absurd reign from the man who will take his folly seriously enough to turn it to tragedy and eucatastrophe, namely that Quin's total inspiration for reintroducing the pageantry and factionalism of feudalism to London is not some long-nurtured Miniver Cheevy-ish nostalgia for an England that never was, but a chance thwack in the ribs with a wooden sword which he receives from a child playing King of the Castle in the streets of Notting Hill, an encounter which he never imagines, any more than the foreseeable outcome of encouraging the farce of a childish war game at adult scale suggests itself to him until it's fighting and dying in his streets, will exercise an equal and opposite influence on the child who grows up to be Adam Wayne, the incorruptible Provost of Notting Hill driven to resist the injustices of urban renewal by force of arms, inspired by his childhood encounter with the King by whom he was gravely told always to fight for "your old inviolate Notting Hill." Their symbiosis creates civil war and empire, the Badon Hill-like finale, the ambiguous epilogue where the masks of the metaphysics come off and what matters is not how things began, but how they are believed in. Of my non-comprehensive experience of Chesterton's fiction, this novel is my favorite; I read it for the first time as a sophomore in college, having tracked it down from the epigraph of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996). I really think they were separated by at least a semester, but it occupies an adjacent space in my memory to Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is fair because both novels feel as though they form part of the substrate of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I like Auberon Quin, of course, which does not mean he isn't for much of the novel a frighteningly hollow kind of person, his jokes an expression far more of nihilism than humor. "I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence."
newredshoes: Madeline Ashby, "Problems Plus Time: What Creates a Dystopia, Real or Imagined." I enjoyed this essay on G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and I disagree slightly with it; I like its use of the novel to examine the definition of a dystopia, but its interpretation of Auberon Quin as the prototype of a twenty-first-century troll-tyrant elides the thing that actually makes him dangerous, which is not that he's so self-centered, but that he has no center at all. When he's still an unimportant and preposterously frivolous government clerk, he is accurately gauged as "a man who cares for nothing but a joke," which is to say "a dangerous man." Unknowing moments away from his accession by lottery to the throne of England, he makes a rare serious statement, which foretells all the trouble to come and which no one heeds: "Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it . . . Be careful how you suggest things to me." Hence the meta-joke-which-isn't at the center of the novel which makes him inseparable from the start of his lethally absurd reign from the man who will take his folly seriously enough to turn it to tragedy and eucatastrophe, namely that Quin's total inspiration for reintroducing the pageantry and factionalism of feudalism to London is not some long-nurtured Miniver Cheevy-ish nostalgia for an England that never was, but a chance thwack in the ribs with a wooden sword which he receives from a child playing King of the Castle in the streets of Notting Hill, an encounter which he never imagines, any more than the foreseeable outcome of encouraging the farce of a childish war game at adult scale suggests itself to him until it's fighting and dying in his streets, will exercise an equal and opposite influence on the child who grows up to be Adam Wayne, the incorruptible Provost of Notting Hill driven to resist the injustices of urban renewal by force of arms, inspired by his childhood encounter with the King by whom he was gravely told always to fight for "your old inviolate Notting Hill." Their symbiosis creates civil war and empire, the Badon Hill-like finale, the ambiguous epilogue where the masks of the metaphysics come off and what matters is not how things began, but how they are believed in. Of my non-comprehensive experience of Chesterton's fiction, this novel is my favorite; I read it for the first time as a sophomore in college, having tracked it down from the epigraph of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996). I really think they were separated by at least a semester, but it occupies an adjacent space in my memory to Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is fair because both novels feel as though they form part of the substrate of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I like Auberon Quin, of course, which does not mean he isn't for much of the novel a frighteningly hollow kind of person, his jokes an expression far more of nihilism than humor. "I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence."
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I mean, that may be a completely reasonable response. I enjoyed The Man Who Was Thursday, and the quality of a surrealist thriller has probably aged even better than it played at the time, but my memory also suggests I thought it disappeared up its own metaphysics at the end.
But I have finally acquired a working copy of The Winslow Boy (1999).
Congratulations! I was beginning to worry it did not actually exist! I am even happier to hear that it's good and intrigued by the differences between the two film versions and of course there was a version with Peter Cushing that I can't watch. Do you mind if I ask for Tumblr links?
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Now that does ring a bell! It doesn't really tell me which way round my reaction was, though, since I like surreal anyway. I'd read Father Brown and some poetry by then, and also The Club of Queer Trades, which I read probably about the mid 90s and remains the thing of his I've liked the most, but since I've never come across it again since, I've no idea whether that was justified or just timing in the order of me reading his stuff.
I am even happier to hear that it's good and intrigued by the differences between the two film versions
As I said, my knowledge is mostly now from the fic I read and the tumblr hole I disappeared down, lol, as well as a v brief making of bit on the DVD, but the 1948 understandably added in some court scenes (which you would really expect a film to do); the 1999 did not, but obviously making Sir Robert younger alters the tone (or I would assume so) and it added an additional exchange of dialogue to the end.* But the director of the 1999 actually wanted to put on a Broadway version and found it so difficult to get backing that he decided it would be easier to make a film. They also use a lot of the historical cartoons and articles for the actual case it's based on throughout as well.
This is the tumblr tag for it, but I don't think you'll be able to see it from outside, but idk - you can try! here: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/The%20Winslow%20Boy?sort=top
(It has unusually little extraneous stuff in it for a tumblr tag, isn't huge, shares content across the various editions, with lots of 99 screencaps but only 48 gifs to start with, person who liked the 99 so much they call their blog girlwhowatchedthewinslowboy (and then watched it 87 times during 2020 because ok why not), plus that one person out on a limb championing the 1977 BBC cardboard version (not me, amazing); go you, 1977 Alan Badel fan.)
But, most importantly, of course, here is the Cushing screencap: https://www.tumblr.com/petercushingonline/128997002706/peter-cushing-as-sir-robert-morton-with-richard?source=share
* ETA: This is something that keeps getting said about the 1999, but I had to do some looking into the play/1948/1999 for formatting a character for wrangling purposes and I'm now very unclear about what the additional dialogue is, or if it's just a confusion from the fact that it seems like it's absent from the 1948 film.
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I will still put it on the list to check out, since I haven't read it. I see no reason for you not to have preferred it in its own right!
but the 1948 understandably added in some court scenes (which you would really expect a film to do)
It does, which is nice for Robert Donat, although it follows the play in withholding the scene of the verdict from the audience and having it relayed to Catherine and her father by Violet the maid, so Katherine Harrison gets the messenger speech after all.
But the director of the 1999 actually wanted to put on a Broadway version and found it so difficult to get backing that he decided it would be easier to make a film. They also use a lot of the historical cartoons and articles for the actual case it's based on throughout as well.
Nice. I wouldn't have expected a film to be easier to produce than a staged version, but at least this way there's a permanent record.
This is the tumblr tag for it, but I don't think you'll be able to see it from outside, but idk - you can try!
I could see about a page before it cut me off! Said page did contain images of Jeremy Northam and Rebecca Pidgeon, though.
But, most importantly, of course, here is the Cushing screencap
"An icy and mercurial performance." Dammit, BBC!
ETA: This is something that keeps getting said about the 1999, but I had to do some looking into the play/1948/1999 for formatting a character for wrangling purposes and I'm now very unclear about what the additional dialogue is, or if it's just a confusion from the fact that it seems like it's absent from the 1948 film.
The major difference between the ending of the play and the 1948 film is that the film adds a hint of romance to the last exchange between Catherine and Sir Robert—when he refers to her suffragist activities as "a lost cause," she responds, "How little you know women, Sir Robert," which gives him the excuse to reply in turn, when she sees him to the door with an expression of skepticism that they will see one another again, "How little you know men, Miss Winslow." (It's the film's last line as well as his exit line; Donat delivers it impishly and well.) It doesn't include her challenge to see him one day across the floor of the House of Commons, and it transposes Ronnie's wandering through the middle of everyone's emotional reactions—having been at the pictures and missed the outcome of his own trial—to an earlier part of the scene where it doesn't break the moment between Catherine and Sir Robert, even though I think that's part of its point of the play. What does the 1999 film do?
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Those aliens out in space catching 1950s TV waves really need to hurry up and pop along with a copy of all the masses of Peter Cushing the BBC just carelessly failed to record or keep! I know, it does sound good.
And, as to the ending of the film, I must have been more tired and therefore deeply unco-ordinated, while flipping between three wiki entries all labelled The Winslow Boy than I realised, despite trying to check carefully which one I was on, but, thanks, I get it now. Basically what everyone was saying was that the 1999 is extremely faithful to the play with no additional court scenes or anything like that, but does incorporate the additional dialogue from the end of the 1948, which makes much more sense. (So, yes, Ronnie interrupts; yes, they have the in the gallery/on the floor challenge, but they also have that final exchange, although it ends not on him, but on the smile she gives after he's gone.)
One of the tumblr posts comments on it as a riff on Pride & Prejudice, which I hadn't thought about while watching, exactly (although tbf I was mainly thinking: Dear God, please don't stop working, thank you), but of course, and I feel like this film riffs on the 1995 P&P in three scenes particularly. (I'm very amused that one of them is the infamous wet shirt scene, only deeply, deeply Rattigan-restrained and obv with at least 2-3 layers of Edwardian clothing already present and correct, but even not thinking about much on the first watch I immediately picked up on the vibes of it being this film's equivalent of that moment.)
Anyway, it was very lovely, and I now know - very nearly 30 years after the fact - that I do like Rattigan a lot and not just The Browning Version. Talking Pictures shows the 1948 every so often, so I shall keep an eye out for it.
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You understand! They can share the rest of the burninated TV while they're at it.
the 1999 is extremely faithful to the play with no additional court scenes or anything like that, but does incorporate the additional dialogue from the end of the 1948, which makes much more sense. (So, yes, Ronnie interrupts; yes, they have the in the gallery/on the floor challenge, but they also have that final exchange, although it ends not on him, but on the smile she gives after he's gone.)
I like that a lot. It sounds like an optimal fusion of the two previous versions and reminds me of the way the 1938 film of Pygmalion bridges the original Shaw and My Fair Lady, only more successfully in that this ending sounds better than My Fair Lady.
(I'm very amused that one of them is the infamous wet shirt scene, only deeply, deeply Rattigan-restrained and obv with at least 2-3 layers of Edwardian clothing already present and correct, but even not thinking about much on the first watch I immediately picked up on the vibes of it being this film's equivalent of that moment.)
And that just sounds incredibly impressive.
Anyway, it was very lovely, and I now know - very nearly 30 years after the fact - that I do like Rattigan a lot and not just The Browning Version. Talking Pictures shows the 1948 every so often, so I shall keep an eye out for it.
I'm so glad! I will try to get hold of the 1999 Winslow Boy.
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Funnily enough, I have just watched My Fair Lady for the first time, and, yeah, that is not an ending! (I watched it after my first Winslow Boy failed to do anything, I think. Or the second. The second, actually, lol...)