1. Happy birthday, Ray Bradbury! You were born in summer, but the sky is as clear and sharpening as fall outside: October travels with you.
2. The trouble with the casting for the new film of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea (2011) is that while there are terrific actors in the lead roles and I am already curious about their interpretations, right now it seems to have deleted one of the most interesting characters. Perhaps he's stunt casting or the press releases just haven't gotten around to him, but there should be a sardonic, slightly shady sort of doctor named Miller. I don't know much about the actor who originated him onstage; he was played in the 1955 film by Eric Portman and if the remake had been done anytime between 1965 and 1992, I'd have been surprised if the part hadn't gone to Denholm Elliott. He brings Hester round after her opening suicide attempt; he is insistent that he hasn't saved her life, she was just too inexperienced to gas herself properly, but he keeps coming back to check on her at unexpected and often unwelcome moments—as when she's contemplating suicide again—his brusque lack of a bedside manner complicated by his obvious medical competence and his apparent employment as a bookie. He's one of the upstairs lodgers; he goes around in a leather jacket and dark glasses that suit him so badly, it feels like a major reveal when Hester divines that he wears them deliberately, to put people off. Eventually it emerges that he was a doctor, and a good one; he still does work he's not paid for at a charity hospital and prefers that no one know about it. No one ever spells out the reason he was struck off and served a term in prison, but a homosexual offence is the most persuasive conclusion. His sympathy for Hester is both an outsider's fellow-feeling and an unrelated pragmatic decency: he's not a saint, but he is her realest ally, the one character who has nothing to gain by any decision she makes except the confidence that she should make it for herself, not to please a lover or placate a husband or satisfy social expectations. None of this makes him an easier conversationalist or a more comfortable person to be around—the terseness, the bluntness about everyone else's motives and the reticence about his own are always there. He stands apart; he knows that Hester, if she's going to survive, will have to do the same. If the new version really has excised him, I think they have taken an important dimension out of the play. I am truly hoping someone just needs to update IMDb.
3. It is perfectly reasonable that Margery Allingham's The Mind Readers (1965) should be science fiction; nearly every one of the Campion mysteries is a different genre, some of them hardly mysteries at all. I just wasn't quite expecting this one's title to mean it.
2. The trouble with the casting for the new film of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea (2011) is that while there are terrific actors in the lead roles and I am already curious about their interpretations, right now it seems to have deleted one of the most interesting characters. Perhaps he's stunt casting or the press releases just haven't gotten around to him, but there should be a sardonic, slightly shady sort of doctor named Miller. I don't know much about the actor who originated him onstage; he was played in the 1955 film by Eric Portman and if the remake had been done anytime between 1965 and 1992, I'd have been surprised if the part hadn't gone to Denholm Elliott. He brings Hester round after her opening suicide attempt; he is insistent that he hasn't saved her life, she was just too inexperienced to gas herself properly, but he keeps coming back to check on her at unexpected and often unwelcome moments—as when she's contemplating suicide again—his brusque lack of a bedside manner complicated by his obvious medical competence and his apparent employment as a bookie. He's one of the upstairs lodgers; he goes around in a leather jacket and dark glasses that suit him so badly, it feels like a major reveal when Hester divines that he wears them deliberately, to put people off. Eventually it emerges that he was a doctor, and a good one; he still does work he's not paid for at a charity hospital and prefers that no one know about it. No one ever spells out the reason he was struck off and served a term in prison, but a homosexual offence is the most persuasive conclusion. His sympathy for Hester is both an outsider's fellow-feeling and an unrelated pragmatic decency: he's not a saint, but he is her realest ally, the one character who has nothing to gain by any decision she makes except the confidence that she should make it for herself, not to please a lover or placate a husband or satisfy social expectations. None of this makes him an easier conversationalist or a more comfortable person to be around—the terseness, the bluntness about everyone else's motives and the reticence about his own are always there. He stands apart; he knows that Hester, if she's going to survive, will have to do the same. If the new version really has excised him, I think they have taken an important dimension out of the play. I am truly hoping someone just needs to update IMDb.
3. It is perfectly reasonable that Margery Allingham's The Mind Readers (1965) should be science fiction; nearly every one of the Campion mysteries is a different genre, some of them hardly mysteries at all. I just wasn't quite expecting this one's title to mean it.
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