The last time I slept eleven hours, I had a lecture-canceling fever and felt awful about everything. Last night, I simply went to bed at midnight because I had burnt out completely on humanity and dreamed of the mostly contemporary, slightly superheroic adventures of a woman who was the daughter-avatar of Kali (and did not go around ripping people's hearts out of their chests, thank you, although I'm not sure anyone's subconscious should get points for being better than Temple of Doom because seriously, it's not hard). I went to the library. I read a very good book on burlesque. I watched a minor, but interesting Hitchcock. I could have done without the hell-blinding headache I woke up with, due to the weather changing, but I did not talk to almost anyone and that was fine with me.
The Paradine Case (1947) is something of a dry run for Vertigo (1958) in that it examines, albeit to a less extreme degree, the downward-spiraling tumbles a man can take when he confuses his fantasy projection of a woman with the real thing. Unfortunately, it's stuck with the structure of a courtroom melodrama as opposed to something twistier—which might have more closely mirrored its protagonist's rabbit-holing obsession—and there are loose ends of subplots sticking out here and there with very little indication of how they got into the script, which makes me wonder what happened at the editing stage; it should be an inexorable dreamy drag-down and instead it keeps breaking up into talking heads. That said, it's Louis Jourdan's first English-language role, Ann Todd gets to play an interesting divergence from the stand-by-your-man type, and I enjoy seeing Gregory Peck as a fallible character, especially given his later near-canonization of lawyer-as-hero as Atticus Finch. Here his Tony Keane is a brilliant barrister, but he's also a terrible emotional fuck-up, and that's not what a modern audience expects from him. He may be one of those actors I like best when cast against type. There are some nice tracking shots in the courtroom, too.
Have a fine obituary for Cris Alexander, who I mentioned when I wrote about Shaun O'Brien. "New Yorkers tend to believe that creative people trapped in America's hinterlands hunger to come to their big, pulsating city to fulfill their dreams. In the case of Cris Alexander, it was true."
The Paradine Case (1947) is something of a dry run for Vertigo (1958) in that it examines, albeit to a less extreme degree, the downward-spiraling tumbles a man can take when he confuses his fantasy projection of a woman with the real thing. Unfortunately, it's stuck with the structure of a courtroom melodrama as opposed to something twistier—which might have more closely mirrored its protagonist's rabbit-holing obsession—and there are loose ends of subplots sticking out here and there with very little indication of how they got into the script, which makes me wonder what happened at the editing stage; it should be an inexorable dreamy drag-down and instead it keeps breaking up into talking heads. That said, it's Louis Jourdan's first English-language role, Ann Todd gets to play an interesting divergence from the stand-by-your-man type, and I enjoy seeing Gregory Peck as a fallible character, especially given his later near-canonization of lawyer-as-hero as Atticus Finch. Here his Tony Keane is a brilliant barrister, but he's also a terrible emotional fuck-up, and that's not what a modern audience expects from him. He may be one of those actors I like best when cast against type. There are some nice tracking shots in the courtroom, too.
Have a fine obituary for Cris Alexander, who I mentioned when I wrote about Shaun O'Brien. "New Yorkers tend to believe that creative people trapped in America's hinterlands hunger to come to their big, pulsating city to fulfill their dreams. In the case of Cris Alexander, it was true."
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