And I take your face in my hands and I bury it in the snow
At least it was snowing this morning when I got up for my doctor's appointment, like a proper spring in New England. According to the streetlight, it's still snowing, a thin dry drift that should be settling onto December. No wonder last night's flowering whatever wanted to come inside where it was warm.
I am re-reading for the first time in six years my directory-thick omnibus of Daniel Fuchs' Brooklyn Novels—Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937). They make me miss New York and my grandparents, whom I can no longer ask how his Brooklyn compares to theirs. I keep forgetting that his small number of screenplays includes several I really care for.
This embroidered art makes me think that one of the tattoo-style mermaids on my lamp got a tattoo of her own. Incidentally it turns out that my lamp may be as old as Fuchs' Brooklyn: it was made by the Faries Manufacturing Company of Decatur, Illinois and the couple of examples of the same style I have discovered for sale on the internet in much worse condition are dated to the 1930's. I've had it since childhood when one of my parents brought it home from a yard sale or an antique shop. It was covered then in a thick layer of chocolate-colored paint that blurred the mermaids scaleless and almost featureless; it was restored for the first time and for many years painted in a sort of Minoan scheme of white and black and green. The current paint job with the peacock-tailed mermaids and the base with its inkwell socket and slot for business cards painted like foam-streaked waves and seagrass is my favorite. Its museum worth may be shot to blazes, but it makes me happy.
If asked to estimate the historicity of Dive Bomber (1941), I would guess that all the personalities are invented but the aviation medicine is real in the sense that G-suits are used to this day to prevent g-force induced loss of consciousness, but it's just a little bit science fiction in that American pilots wouldn't get into them until 1943 and the first designs to see combat were Canadian and Australian in 1942. It's right up to the edge of alternate history even without the G-suits, to be honest. It was filmed in the spring and released in the late summer of 1941. Its Navy pilots talk of war as a sure and coming thing—Warner Bros. had been pushing the envelope of the Hollywood embargo on anti-Nazi pictures since Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), in which spirit a name-check is conspicuously withheld from isolationist Lindbergh—and look forward to their assignment to Pearl Harbor without a hint of the irony which no historical fiction would be able to get away with dodging. The aircraft carrier photographed in the opening sequence in such impressive Technicolor turns out to be the USS Enterprise. The film should perhaps be regarded as a combination medical thriller and air show, its bright-winged mix of planes half Pacific preview and half imminently obsolete. Out of a cast including Fred MacMurray, Errol Flynn, Regis Toomey, Robert Armstrong, and Alexis Smith in her first credited role as some incredibly pasted on het, I gravitated obviously toward Ralph Bellamy as the brilliant flight surgeon who wrecked his health running high-altitude experiments on himself and now serves as the grouchily grounded boffin of the team that coalesces to combat "blackout . . . our kind and the sort they're having over London right now." When it's not being earnestly hopeless in 20/20, the script displays a congenital level of sarcasm worthy of another vodka stinger.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I both liked the sign-off "Valves to you."
I am re-reading for the first time in six years my directory-thick omnibus of Daniel Fuchs' Brooklyn Novels—Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937). They make me miss New York and my grandparents, whom I can no longer ask how his Brooklyn compares to theirs. I keep forgetting that his small number of screenplays includes several I really care for.
This embroidered art makes me think that one of the tattoo-style mermaids on my lamp got a tattoo of her own. Incidentally it turns out that my lamp may be as old as Fuchs' Brooklyn: it was made by the Faries Manufacturing Company of Decatur, Illinois and the couple of examples of the same style I have discovered for sale on the internet in much worse condition are dated to the 1930's. I've had it since childhood when one of my parents brought it home from a yard sale or an antique shop. It was covered then in a thick layer of chocolate-colored paint that blurred the mermaids scaleless and almost featureless; it was restored for the first time and for many years painted in a sort of Minoan scheme of white and black and green. The current paint job with the peacock-tailed mermaids and the base with its inkwell socket and slot for business cards painted like foam-streaked waves and seagrass is my favorite. Its museum worth may be shot to blazes, but it makes me happy.
If asked to estimate the historicity of Dive Bomber (1941), I would guess that all the personalities are invented but the aviation medicine is real in the sense that G-suits are used to this day to prevent g-force induced loss of consciousness, but it's just a little bit science fiction in that American pilots wouldn't get into them until 1943 and the first designs to see combat were Canadian and Australian in 1942. It's right up to the edge of alternate history even without the G-suits, to be honest. It was filmed in the spring and released in the late summer of 1941. Its Navy pilots talk of war as a sure and coming thing—Warner Bros. had been pushing the envelope of the Hollywood embargo on anti-Nazi pictures since Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), in which spirit a name-check is conspicuously withheld from isolationist Lindbergh—and look forward to their assignment to Pearl Harbor without a hint of the irony which no historical fiction would be able to get away with dodging. The aircraft carrier photographed in the opening sequence in such impressive Technicolor turns out to be the USS Enterprise. The film should perhaps be regarded as a combination medical thriller and air show, its bright-winged mix of planes half Pacific preview and half imminently obsolete. Out of a cast including Fred MacMurray, Errol Flynn, Regis Toomey, Robert Armstrong, and Alexis Smith in her first credited role as some incredibly pasted on het, I gravitated obviously toward Ralph Bellamy as the brilliant flight surgeon who wrecked his health running high-altitude experiments on himself and now serves as the grouchily grounded boffin of the team that coalesces to combat "blackout . . . our kind and the sort they're having over London right now." When it's not being earnestly hopeless in 20/20, the script displays a congenital level of sarcasm worthy of another vodka stinger.
spatch and I both liked the sign-off "Valves to you."
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Decatur! I used to live near there.
I want to watch this movie now. My period aviation movie list grows ever longer.
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Neat! Apparently one of their chief exports for decades was highly recognizable desk and industrial lamps.
I want to watch this movie now. My period aviation movie list grows ever longer.
*cough*
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It's true.
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As a U of T alumna I must give a shoutout to the Franks Flying Suit!
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Please do! Dive Bomber does not! A character joins the RCAF, though!
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You're welcome! I knew him as a screenplay credit until I saw The Gangster (1947), which was adapted from Low Company, after which I was finally inspired to look him up and read him.
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I love that!
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The scale-color leapt out at me!