Instead of praising our goulash, they're appraising the plays of Willie Mays

[sovay]

Because I did not sleep at all last night and did not end up talking on the phone to the friend I had planned this afternoon, I walked around the block and fried some mackerel and spent the evening more or less prone on the couch with Hestia. At one point I was actually asleep on the couch under Hestia, but then some of the upstairs people came noisily home and she heard them on the porch through the window I had left open for the air which smelled like petrichor and made a claw-assisted takeoff which woke me up. I rewatched The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) on Criterion and Way Out West (1930) on TCM and I still love both of them. I did not love The Seventh Sin (1957) as a version of Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil (1925), but George Sanders makes such an excellently disreputable and trustworthy Waddington that I waive the requirement of the character looking accurately like his 2006 casting of Toby Jones. On Sanders even dissipation looks good, but the tie for a belt is a nice touch. I do not understand how One Way Street (1950) can start with such a banger of an opening as James Mason apparently poisoning Dan Duryea in order to steal $200,000 and Märta Torén with William Conrad and King Donovan looking on and Jack Elam jack-in-the-boxing out of the back seat during the getaway and then flange off into a soft-focus holiday in Mexico that could have undone the Good Neighbor Policy. I feel like I need to apologize to Hugo Fregonese for introducing myself to his films with that one. I am now in search of Philip Stong's State Fair (1932), since spatch and I just watched the 1933 film as a bookend to the 1945 musical which he had shown me earlier this spring, six of Lew Ayres, half dozen of Harry Morgan, if you miss Rodgers and Hammerstein in the pre-Code there's always the roller coaster. I can't see Lake George (2024) until it gets off the festival circuit, but this review immediately made me want to. I also read some books.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I do not understand how One Way Street (1950)can start with such a banger of an opening ... and then flange off into a soft-focus holiday in Mexico that could have undone the Good Neighbor Policy. --ahahaha, this made me laugh. "Flange off," great verb, reference to high school social studies classes, A++

I looked at the write up for Lake George, and it sounds good, but I'm bothered by the fact that a film called Lake George is set in LA! It ought to connect to the Adirondacks's Lake George, a place that when I was a kid growing up outside of Albany, people were always going to during the summer. Not us, ever, until one time when our neighbors invited us to visit for the day in late August or early September. The day was chilly and the lake was warm from a whole summer of heating: mist was rising off it, and I paddled around on some thing that you paddle around standing up in, feeling like I had lucked into a magical world ... George is a common name, though; I'm betting if I look on Google Maps I find out there's a Lake George near LA somewhere.

[sovay]

--ahahaha, this made me laugh. "Flange off," great verb, reference to high school social studies classes, A++

Thank you!

It ought to connect to the Adirondacks's Lake George, a place that when I was a kid growing up outside of Albany, people were always going to during the summer. Not us, ever, until one time when our neighbors invited us to visit for the day in late August or early September. The day was chilly and the lake was warm from a whole summer of heating: mist was rising off it, and I paddled around on some thing that you paddle around standing up in, feeling like I had lucked into a magical world ...

It sounds enchanted! Maybe the characters in L.A. dream of a day like that at Lake George.