And it feels like the sky is speaking up about the things that you've seen so long untold
My poem "The Green Room" has been accepted by Not One of Us, whose regular website is still down and whose number of old-school saddle-stapled black-and-white print issues passed threescore and ten last year. I have referred to the poem as "a sort of depressed rural Inanna thing." It is almost my first piece of non-film writing since the beginning of the year.
I realized that when![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I were on Star Island, it tapped into my childhood, too: it was the kind of trip I would have taken with my grandparents during some of the weeks each summer when I stayed with them by myself, like the time we went to the White Mountains or the time we went to Acadia or even a whale watch or a visit to Old Orchard Beach. In hindsight it feels purely accidental that we never went to the Isles of Shoals. Next summer I want to take my niece.
Somewhere in the Night (1946) turns out to be the kind of film noir whose candy-crack dialogue and shadowboxing plot I can enjoy without feeling all that deeply about most of it, but no one can say it doesn't give value for money when its small parts all turn up faces like Harry Morgan, Whit Bissell, Sheldon Leonard, and finally Fritz Kortner stealing all of his scenes and as much of the movie as will stick to them as a magnificent charlatan, a quondam big shot now reduced to paying the bills with phony crystal-gazing and one last grab at the brass ring of the ex-Nazi $2 million that MacGuffined the plot back in 1942, although since we have only his word to take for his former glories, for all we know he's always been this seedily dignified, disarmingly rueful small-timer who manages to make, if not a virtue, then at least a charm of his transparent dishonesty, by which he professes himself faintly embarrassed, not so much of course that he would let it get in the way of a necessary double-cross. It must be rough on the official stars of the picture—John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Richard Conte—when the only characters of comparable impact are similarly supporting turns like Margo Woode, Josephine Hutchinson, Lloyd Nolan as the good-natured detective lieutenant always complaining that detectives in the movies never, like normal, polite people in the real world, take off their hats. "He's homicide," Conte reminds Guild. She sat next to him at a Chinese restaurant; she sniffs, unimpressed, "He steals fried shrimps."
P.S. It feels characteristic of this summer that by the time I find out there finally exists a Blu-Ray of the 2016 restoration of John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940), it's already out of stock. I suppose its being on sale had something to do with it. I do still have my pre-restoration, out-of-print DVD. Someday I will manage to read the shooting script.
I realized that when
spatch and I were on Star Island, it tapped into my childhood, too: it was the kind of trip I would have taken with my grandparents during some of the weeks each summer when I stayed with them by myself, like the time we went to the White Mountains or the time we went to Acadia or even a whale watch or a visit to Old Orchard Beach. In hindsight it feels purely accidental that we never went to the Isles of Shoals. Next summer I want to take my niece.Somewhere in the Night (1946) turns out to be the kind of film noir whose candy-crack dialogue and shadowboxing plot I can enjoy without feeling all that deeply about most of it, but no one can say it doesn't give value for money when its small parts all turn up faces like Harry Morgan, Whit Bissell, Sheldon Leonard, and finally Fritz Kortner stealing all of his scenes and as much of the movie as will stick to them as a magnificent charlatan, a quondam big shot now reduced to paying the bills with phony crystal-gazing and one last grab at the brass ring of the ex-Nazi $2 million that MacGuffined the plot back in 1942, although since we have only his word to take for his former glories, for all we know he's always been this seedily dignified, disarmingly rueful small-timer who manages to make, if not a virtue, then at least a charm of his transparent dishonesty, by which he professes himself faintly embarrassed, not so much of course that he would let it get in the way of a necessary double-cross. It must be rough on the official stars of the picture—John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Richard Conte—when the only characters of comparable impact are similarly supporting turns like Margo Woode, Josephine Hutchinson, Lloyd Nolan as the good-natured detective lieutenant always complaining that detectives in the movies never, like normal, polite people in the real world, take off their hats. "He's homicide," Conte reminds Guild. She sat next to him at a Chinese restaurant; she sniffs, unimpressed, "He steals fried shrimps."
P.S. It feels characteristic of this summer that by the time I find out there finally exists a Blu-Ray of the 2016 restoration of John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940), it's already out of stock. I suppose its being on sale had something to do with it. I do still have my pre-restoration, out-of-print DVD. Someday I will manage to read the shooting script.
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Thank you!
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(On a related note: last night I rewatched "Lady of burlesque", which fits right in the "can enjoy without feeling all that deeply about most of it" category!)
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The amnesia is a great gimmick! John Hodiak crashing around Los Angeles discovering that everyone believes he knows a lot more about Larry Cravat and the missing $2 million than he really does was very well done. The movie as a whole just never lit up for me as strongly as some of its component pieces, like Fritz Kortner, or Lloyd Nolan and his hat.
(On a related note: last night I rewatched "Lady of burlesque", which fits right in the "can enjoy without feeling all that deeply about most of it" category!)
Yes! I remember it as being delightful, and a lot closer to the original novel than some adaptations I could name (most of them).
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He sounds like a Fredric Brown character!
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He would have been a great Fredric Brown character!
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(Whit Bissell!)
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Thank you!
(Whit Bissell!)
Uncredited and to date the earliest I've seen him!
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Here's to a return to Star Island next summer--with niece.
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Thank you!
Here's to a return to Star Island next summer--with niece.
From your lips to the sea's ears.
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Thank you!
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Also taking your niece to Star Island sounds fantastic.
Also I put this movie on my list. It's an awfully long list and most of it is your doing. I should organize it, or start it, or something.
P.
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Thank you!
Also taking your niece to Star Island sounds fantastic.
I've proposed it to her father.
Also I put this movie on my list. It's an awfully long list and most of it is your doing. I should organize it, or start it, or something.
I'm honored. I mean it. I hope you enjoy your list as you get around to it!
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Thank you!
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Thank you!