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Your body cannot lie
Following a rather friably sleepless Easter, I slept nine or ten hours and resent dreaming of poetry without bringing it out with me this time. I was spending time in evocatively broken-down places by the sea.
March ran out so disastrously, I never got around to linking either of these novelettes: M.E. Bronstein's "Bitter as the Sea" (2026) and Michael Cisco's "Tatterdemalion" (2026).
After nearly twenty years of doing nothing with the extras on my Criterion DVD of A Canterbury Tale (1944), I watched the interview with Sheila Sim which was recorded in 2006. I had never seen her as herself with so much time between her memories and her own ghost of hillsides and reflected sunlight, the house in the country where Alison exclaimed, "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that!" exactly as Sim realizes, as if she caught her character's dream, in the more than sixty years since she spoke that line she has done. It was her first film, straight out of drama school with the careful accent that sounds so artificial to her now; she had to learn to act for the camera, in the open air; she did not have to know that the part had been written originally for someone else, whom I have never been able to imagine in it without losing the earth wire of the character. She was right that it became its own kind of continuity through time, more so than even the regular haunting of film:
"I think I'm a little surprised that the film works for young people today—not necessarily young people, middle-aged people as well—but I'm very touched and very pleased in the best sense of the word that it does. Maybe we feel today, rightly or wrongly, that we are losing certain things that we had then. Maybe a kind of nostalgia that makes people love the film. The connection with history and the people who've gone before and the countryside that goes on, the countryside that we to some extent take for granted. We're realizing now in our present world that we are not entitled to take it for granted. It's not going to last."
Not even the film is going to, but on its own terms of folk anti-horror, I do not expect that hillside ever to be without the imprint of Alison Smith and Sheila Sim, even when it's under ocean again, even after the seas run dry.
March ran out so disastrously, I never got around to linking either of these novelettes: M.E. Bronstein's "Bitter as the Sea" (2026) and Michael Cisco's "Tatterdemalion" (2026).
After nearly twenty years of doing nothing with the extras on my Criterion DVD of A Canterbury Tale (1944), I watched the interview with Sheila Sim which was recorded in 2006. I had never seen her as herself with so much time between her memories and her own ghost of hillsides and reflected sunlight, the house in the country where Alison exclaimed, "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that!" exactly as Sim realizes, as if she caught her character's dream, in the more than sixty years since she spoke that line she has done. It was her first film, straight out of drama school with the careful accent that sounds so artificial to her now; she had to learn to act for the camera, in the open air; she did not have to know that the part had been written originally for someone else, whom I have never been able to imagine in it without losing the earth wire of the character. She was right that it became its own kind of continuity through time, more so than even the regular haunting of film:
"I think I'm a little surprised that the film works for young people today—not necessarily young people, middle-aged people as well—but I'm very touched and very pleased in the best sense of the word that it does. Maybe we feel today, rightly or wrongly, that we are losing certain things that we had then. Maybe a kind of nostalgia that makes people love the film. The connection with history and the people who've gone before and the countryside that goes on, the countryside that we to some extent take for granted. We're realizing now in our present world that we are not entitled to take it for granted. It's not going to last."
Not even the film is going to, but on its own terms of folk anti-horror, I do not expect that hillside ever to be without the imprint of Alison Smith and Sheila Sim, even when it's under ocean again, even after the seas run dry.
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There was a ton of dialect leveling over the twentieth century. My grandfather retained his strong Brooklyn accent to the end of his life and the contrast by then was dramatic.
As he hadn't had drama school training, presumably his wasn't put on? Though he may have been asked to ham it up for the camera, dunno.
Sim said he was very natural: she learned screen acting from him not because he had any experience with it, but because he was such an unselfconscious scene partner, always listening and reacting as if there weren't even a camera. (Eric Portman and Dennis Price were useful to learn the more technical sides from. She's very complimentary of all her co-stars and I can only hope they returned the favor. They were such an essential ensemble.)
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