If we're playing a part, then we all must be auditioning
I am eating knishes for Boxing Day. Autolycus just did his best to precipitate himself bodily through the glass of my office window in order to get at the delicious-looking sparrow in the yew tree outside. Yesterday ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch stayed home with him so that I could spend a slice of Christmas itself with my parents and rushthatspeaks and nineweaving and our traditional roast beef and brandy-burning plum pudding. I had gotten out briefly the previous evening to put the molded amber glass Star of David first of all on the tree. My parents seem to have leaned very supportively into the idea of noir as a comfort genre, as I now find myself in possession of the Criterion DVD of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) with fantastically pulp design by F. Ron Miller and recent reprints of Murray Forbes' Hollow Triumph (1946) and Marty Holland's The Glass Heart (1946) and The Sleeping City (1952). From my husbands I got Warsan Shire's Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022) and Eddie Muller's Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir (2023), which has so far made me happiest by appropriately pairing Decoy (1946) with the Corpse Reviver #2 and informing me that Joan Blondell had a cocktail invented in her honor in the early '30's. Today I have done very little that was not in one way or the other focused around the cat, but he remains so very worth it. My niece will be dropping by to see us later on.
spatch stayed home with him so that I could spend a slice of Christmas itself with my parents and rushthatspeaks and nineweaving and our traditional roast beef and brandy-burning plum pudding. I had gotten out briefly the previous evening to put the molded amber glass Star of David first of all on the tree. My parents seem to have leaned very supportively into the idea of noir as a comfort genre, as I now find myself in possession of the Criterion DVD of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) with fantastically pulp design by F. Ron Miller and recent reprints of Murray Forbes' Hollow Triumph (1946) and Marty Holland's The Glass Heart (1946) and The Sleeping City (1952). From my husbands I got Warsan Shire's Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022) and Eddie Muller's Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir (2023), which has so far made me happiest by appropriately pairing Decoy (1946) with the Corpse Reviver #2 and informing me that Joan Blondell had a cocktail invented in her honor in the early '30's. Today I have done very little that was not in one way or the other focused around the cat, but he remains so very worth it. My niece will be dropping by to see us later on.
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Me too! Even if I was very startled, as he went zero-to-sixty from apparently napping beside my computer to throwing himself at full stretch and claws at the window. (He was rewarded with liverwurst. Such a brave hunter.)
Those are some excellent noir gifts. (I just read Margaret Millar's The Fiend, which came out a little late to be classified as noir but is nonetheless impressive.)
I read that one about seven or eight years ago when I had just discovered Millar! Yes. Now I want to re-read it, which will require unpacking.
I have to say that having now read three novels by Marty Holland, I even more desperately want to read her original story for The File on Thelma Jordon, even if it was just literally a treatment and not a narrative as such—Fallen Angel, The Glass Heart, and The Sleeping City are all written in different male voices and I would love to know what her version of Cleve sounded like from the inside. I hope it's in the Paramount archives. I have also not been able to find out what happened that the film version of The Glass Heart was never produced even with James M. Cain writing the screenplay. It would have been one of the B-movies like three different pictures collided at a four-way stop, but it would have been a lot of fun.