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]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
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Thank you! He was so good! I really don't think I have seen him that often as such an authentic threat. He was well served by Diskant's photography, too.
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> fatale
Yeah, it's a little odd to see folks sometimes treat archetypes as more than a vague approximation that can, sometimes, be worth attending to, but instead choose to treat a potentially interesting pattern as if it inevitably more important than the complexity of a rounded character.
As if directors were playing DnD, and "the fatale" was a character class, or whatever.
(Now I want to create "Milksop" as a character class...)
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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*)
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I feel like a transient and unstable radioisotope! Transient and Unstable Radioisotopes of the World Unite! We are Golden!
a summer-suited stone cold sketch artist *shiver* Riffraff sounds good.
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I can see that! Honestly, that's delightful. I happened to see him in People Will Talk (1951) at a reasonably formative age and my grandparents had his biography in the house, titled after his father's legendary, I still hope not apocryphal line: What Time's the Next Swan? (1962).
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Absolutely. Especially when it happens to a hitherto reliable medium atomic weight.
Good luck with getting to the Noir event; and that is a very cool screenshot.
Thank you! The noir is fortunately not until June, so I have some theoretical weeks to get my act together as opposed to bailing on
In the meantime, I wish my A-Level history of Democracies and Totalitarian States would stop being so relevant all the time.
Knowing history is sure a kick in the head.
*hugs*
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That is a great photo of Walter Slezak.
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You are a treasure.
Riffraff sounds good.
It was a delight! Smartly written, gorgeously shot, characters an inventive half-step off the usual, e.g. Pat O'Brien expecting to pocket the easiest $5000 in the world for locating a man he's just taken on as a client only to discover his pigeon dead in his bathtub and at least two factions trying to get their hands on a MacGuffin whose existence he wasn't even clued in on and even as he gets to grips with the upshot in violence in his normal work week, he looks deeply exasperated by having to work for his money after all. The local chief of police is clearly just trying to get through the day while suffering interruptions from a detective noir. There is no scene where Jeffreys as opposed to O'Brien is in need of rescue: I repeat, she doesn't scream on the sidelines of a fight, she flings herself right into the middle of it and incidentally finds the MacGuffin while hanging on to Slezak by his hair. If the film didn't end with her and O'Brien romantically clinched, he should at least have taken her on as a partner and probably still should. Riffraff was directed by Ted Tetzlaff who was better known as a cinematographer—he lensed some notable screwballs and one sterling Hitchcock—and I would totally class it with The Big Sleep (1946) as a rare screwball noir. The threat level is real, but the wisecracks are priceless.
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That is an excellent way to describe the problem. It's so boxed-in.
(Now I want to create "Milksop" as a character class...)
(Let me know what that looks like!)
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I would not have recognized the reference at the time, but I love the connection.
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Right? Maybe I will finally even be able to write about it instead of incoherently pointing to all of its ladies.
(This year I finally started going to movies again for the first time since the start of the pandemic, in no small part because I discovered my local movie house is screening a lot of cool classics, via the American Cinematheque.)
Nice! I'm so glad you have somewhere with excellent programming that feels safe. What have you been seeing?
That is a great photo of Walter Slezak.
Thank you! All credit to George E. Diskant. I just screencapped it.
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That's so cool. I am planning to see The Great Escape (1963) two Sundays from now at the Somerville for similar reasons.
Most recently I saw, and loved, Sinners at a theater in Glendale; I want to see it in IMAX, but that may be more challenging. (It was showing in IMAX at my other neighborhood theater, but it was sold out on the day I wanted to go.)
I have heard nothing but praise for that movie and I am delighted to have your good opinion to add to the rest. It is also playing the Somerville, about to be held over for its third week, and it is on my and
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The threat level is real, but the wisecracks are priceless. --Aaaaahhh, sounds so good. (I clicked on your clickable title and got to the TCM page, and Anne Jeffries definitely looks COMPETENT as well as female. Nice.)
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Strange things can happen to agents in the field!
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Do it do it do it do it.
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... Uh. Sorry. I'm not entirely sure where that lot came from!
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It's criminal! I was hoping to see you. I hope you will at least be out of town somewhere nice.
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