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Breathlessly throwing time away
In honor of Leslie Howard's birthday of a hundred and thirty-one years, please enjoy one of my favorite pictures of him. It comes from the set of The Gentle Sex (1943), the last film in which he appeared and the last whose direction he completed in his life; he cast himself as the omnisciently fallible narrator, confidently wrong every time about the capabilities of women in war. The camera glimpses just once over his shoulder as he selects his cast who will confound him, raincoat-clad like the eternal Henry Higgins. Offscreen—
He doesn't look like the more than matinée idol, the numinous national symbol who had appeared for the last time to the British public as Nelson on the steps of St Paul's. He looks like the eagerly charming weirdo described by so many slightly bemused interviews of the 1930's, the one who always seems to have been an anorak for photography and dressed in the same careless clothes and couldn't dance and really needed glasses and was dead-ahead unstoppable about anything in which he was really interested and the definition of a luftmentsh about everything in which he wasn't: how it delights me that he carried the romantic laurels of his day. I have wanted for years to know the films he would have made if he had lived past fifty, even past the war. Pictures like this one don't make me want them any less.
He doesn't look like the more than matinée idol, the numinous national symbol who had appeared for the last time to the British public as Nelson on the steps of St Paul's. He looks like the eagerly charming weirdo described by so many slightly bemused interviews of the 1930's, the one who always seems to have been an anorak for photography and dressed in the same careless clothes and couldn't dance and really needed glasses and was dead-ahead unstoppable about anything in which he was really interested and the definition of a luftmentsh about everything in which he wasn't: how it delights me that he carried the romantic laurels of his day. I have wanted for years to know the films he would have made if he had lived past fifty, even past the war. Pictures like this one don't make me want them any less.
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I never remember him in time to celebrate a significant year, but I still celebrate him.
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I raise a metaphorical glass in his honor (and would like to raise an actual mug of tea any minute now...).
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I have loved him in literally everything I have ever seen him in with the potential exception of Gone with the Wind and I don't feel bad about that one, since he didn't much like it, either.
(I tried to find a decent-quality copy of The Gentle Sex and found only mediocre ones, but it is on the Internet Archive. I saw it a dozen years ago on TCM.)
I raise a metaphorical glass in his honor (and would like to raise an actual mug of tea any minute now...).
I really hope you've had your tea by now.
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P.
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He insists on it in one of the interviews! He does dance in Stand-In (1937), but his character does it literally by numbers. It's adorable.
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You're welcome! I am also fond of this one from the same production (Howard, seated and smoking, wearing an ATS cap):
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Me too. It feels as if his work would only have gotten deeper and more interesting.
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A person who could make Pimpernel Smith, I wouldn't put any limits on what they could do.
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Somewhere there's a world where Leslie Howard and Lal Waterson and Angela Carter are still creating art. I only wish we could import it.
*hugs*
Nine
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Thank you. He's important to remember.
Somewhere there's a world where Leslie Howard and Lal Waterson and Angela Carter are still creating art. I only wish we could import it.
*hugs*
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Thank you!