A place could not be thinner for such an undertaking

[sovay]

I did not approve of concluding our break-fast to discover that David McCallum had died. I saw him first in The Great Escape (1963), which always seemed to be playing somewhere in my childhood. My brother was almost named Ilya until my father remonstrated with my mother that their children would sound like a Russian vaudeville act. Every headline I've seen mentions The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and NCIS (2003–), but he will always look to me like something even more enigmatic than a slim, blond-mopped Russian agent, because at least Kuryakin was human. In the same way that Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) left its final assignment suspended in stars and narrative, I imagine McCallum like Steel disappearing out of time like a video cut, itself the kind of ghost that would have fit seamlessly into his medium atomic weight's store of exasperation with the human carelessness of time and its traces, our deliberate preservation of lost moments that opens up cracks in the world as flimsy as a filmstrip and as engulfing as centuries, but these deaths twenty-four times a second are the only way I have ever known him, even when he was alive, like every actor trailing roles behind him like freeze-frames. I will find a new one for his memory. I assume the integrity of time is pretty much a dead loss in our TV.

Comments

[alexxkay]

In my youth, I imprinted strongly on his Caedmon Records reading of "The Rats in the Walls". I'm not sure if that was the first HPL I encountered or not, but it definitely contributed to my appreciation for his work.

(Unfortunate that this work is marred by the Very Racist Cat Name...)

[sovay]

In my youth, I imprinted strongly on his Caedmon Records reading of "The Rats in the Walls". I'm not sure if that was the first HPL I encountered or not, but it definitely contributed to my appreciation for his work.

Thanks for the link. What do you think of his other Lovecraft recordings? I've heard Roddy McDowall's.

[alexxkay]

I did not until this moment know that there *were* others. (Or Roddy McDowell ones, for that matter.) Thank you! Will investigate and report back!

[sovay]

(Or Roddy McDowell ones, for that matter.) Thank you! Will investigate and report back!

Yes! He did "The Outsider" and "The Hound." The source I used for them eleven years ago is dead, but it looks as though YouTube provides. Enjoy!

[alexxkay]

"The Dunwich Horror": Abridged, unsurprisingly, given its length. The story is really not one of my favorite stories, though generally rated high in the HPL canon. McCallum does regional accents much more accurately than my recent complaints about del Toro -- but they add a note of ridiculousness that I felt detracted from the tone. Thumbs-down.

"The Haunter of the Dark": Not bad, not great. A very good performance of a lesser story. It's arguably a self-parody by HPL, but McCallum plays it straight to good effect. Ending is anti-climactic, though McCallum does his very best to try and make it impressive.

"The Rats in the Walls" was a great melding of source and medium. It's a very good story, of exactly the right length, and delivered by a first-person narrator, so there's no obtrusive accents. Also, it contains none of Lovecraft's unpronounceable language. (McCallum does a decent job with those in the other stories, but it just doesn't have a good effect when a human speaks it.)

As a side-note, I think I have heard the word "foetor" said aloud more times tonight than in my entire previous life. Everyone makes fun of "squamous", but HPL barely uses that one.