sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-05-12 05:18 am

Hey, kid, just sing the songs that wake the dead

It upsets me for many reasons that science in this country is about to crash for a generation if we're lucky, but one more is the news which [personal profile] spatch just sent me that it is now possible to synchrotronically transmute lead into gold so long as you don't mind the gold being a transient and unstable radioisotope. Is there a productive application for this discovery? Do I care? I'd rather it take my tax money than anything advanced by RFK Jr. I like libraries and habeas corpus, too.

To every nimrod who still wants to claim that the women of noir are misogynistically divided between the milksop and the fatale, I commend the enchantingly left-field battle royale climax of Riffraff (1947) in which Anne Jeffreys launches herself like a pro wrestler onto Walter Slezak while Pat O'Brien is still fighting off his goons and then squashes him under a bookcase from which he has to disencumber himself like the victim of a Murphy bed. It's even goofier and braver because Slezak in this film has real menace, a summer-suited stone cold sketch artist who finishes up his latest street scene while his hired muscle is slugging the bejeezus out of O'Brien, whose amiable chiseler of a private eye has a nicely careless chemistry with Jeffreys' canary, herself the kind of platinum-tressed pulp ideal who can pick herself up from getting cold-cocked in someone else's tossed office with breezily tart sang-froid. The opening murder at 30,000 feet is breathtaking in its sharp-shot night rain and silence, but I may still consider the film stolen by Percy Kilbride as the sarcastically milk-tippling cabbie whose jalopy fires up like the 1812 Overture and whose gag of mending O'Brien's shirts runs all the way through a proposal into breach of promise. He's the cherry on this modest but satisfying sundae of RKO B-noir which balances its shortfalls in budget with buckets of style, incidentally the first non-short film I have managed to watch this month. "You got the piano player?"

Speaking of women in noir, the Brattle has announced this year's Noir City Boston and despite the presence of Foster Hirsch, I am not missing Caged (1950) on 35 mm, not to mention I have never seen the directorial debut of Mickey Rooney, My True Story (1951). I reserve the right to throw popcorn if he mischaracterizes any of the dark city dames I know anything about.

thisbluespirit: (s&s - silver/steel)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-05-12 05:51 pm (UTC)(link)
it is now possible to synchrotronically transmute lead into gold so long as you don't mind the gold being a transient and unstable radioisotope.

This sounds like something Steel would have concerns about.

Good luck with getting to the Noir event; and that is a very cool screenshot.

(In the meantime, I wish my A-Level history of Democracies and Totalitarian States would stop being so relevant all the time. *hugs*)
chanter1944: Émilie Agreste, acting in the canon movie Solitude, peeking out from behind a large umbrella (ML - Émilie: camouflage mode)

[personal profile] chanter1944 2025-05-13 02:32 am (UTC)(link)
Oh goodness, Gold is enough of a concern but I've just realized - poor Lead! :( I can envision Sapphire objecting quite strenuously to anyone potentially hurting him. Steel too, in his own way, though you'll not catch him admitting so aloud.
thisbluespirit: (Default)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-05-13 07:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Given what Gold is like in the audios, too, no one would be happy about it! They need to leave Lead alone; he's fine as he is! XD
chanter1944: the peafowl miraculous, in its active state (ML - peafowl miraculous: magical mystery)

[personal profile] chanter1944 2025-05-14 02:05 am (UTC)(link)
I do need to listen to these audios, don't I? I've hesitated up to now, concerned that I'd trip over the differences in voices.
thisbluespirit: (s&s)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-05-14 09:28 am (UTC)(link)
I tend to think of it being very optional, but if you like that kind of thing, they do include some of Big Finish's best audios. David Warner and Susannah York are very good alternatives, plus they did get David Collings to reprise Silver for three of them. (There's a suggestion in it, too, that sometimes you just get new Sapphires and Steels who are fundamentally the same Sapphires and Steels anyway, but who knows?) Anyway, at this point, whenever it's been a while since I've watched/listened, Steel looks like David McCallum and sounds like David Warner in my head, and I'm quite happy with that. XD But plenty of other people don't really want to try it with other people, either, and that's quite understandable.