I pulled my coat tight against the falling down

1. My poem "The Wearing Season" has been accepted by Through the Gate. Traditionally, my best working environment is an overlit computer screen far too late at night, so the fact that I wrote this entire piece while sitting in on the dress rehearsals for Tomes of Terror: New Arrivals was a new one on me. It started as lines on napkins. I stole derspatchel's pen. It's one of the ways I feel about autumn, but not all of them.

2. I watched Carl Theodore Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). It is as powerful as its reputation; I have rarely seen a movie with that immediate and iconic a grip on the viewer. Dreyer's film language is not that which followed after him; Renée Jeanne Falconetti's face is like nothing else onscreen in '28. I want very much to see Vampyr (1932) now, but first I am going to continue to be amazed/troubled/awed by the things I saw on a flatscreen TV this afternoon, in fifteenth-century France.

3. I do not have much to say to the "Unfuck Your [Whatever]" movement. If I want to reorganize my life, I don't need a trendy slogan to do it; and let's face it, I already personify two of my neuroses and a person has to draw the line somewhere. That said: fuck you, notes all over my desktop that never became posts. Some of you go back two and three years at this point. Some of you are promises I never kept. (Some of you don't exist for movies I wish you did, but that's a different problem.) This one was only supposed to go up in March, elaborating on an e-mail to strange_selkie with comments made to asakiyume, but then it didn't and I have no idea why. I may have thought it was superfluous. It may still not be very relevant, but at least it's going to be off my hard drive.

Nowadays, Robert Newton is probably most famous for inspiring International Talk Like a Pirate Day with the flamboyant West Country accent he used for Long John Silver in Disney's Treasure Island (1950), before which no one had ever imagined that historical pirates said "ARRRR!" on a regular basis. He really was from Dorset, although I don't know any other roles where you can hear it. He was a painter's son and a writer's; in his early career, he was a scene painter and a stage manager as often as he was an actor, and I don't know that he was ever handsome, but I think he was beautiful. Solid-browed, dark-eyed, with a long wry mouth and softer eyelashes than they used to like on leading men; he wasn't lanky, so I never remember he was six feet tall. He could look puckish; he could look like a thug. He would have been a perfect Heathcliff in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939), but Samuel Goldwyn didn't like his looks and demanded a more conventionally modeled actor. I saw him first as Bill Walker in Major Barbara (1941), a complicated tough who comes to fetch his girl back from the Salvation Army and stays to argue social activism and hypocrisy with the title character, although neither of them are quite aware that's what he's doing. He's a scarier Bill Sikes in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) than Oliver Reed in Carol Reed's Oliver! (1968) because there are moments where he looks as much of a lost child as Dickens' eponymous orphan, only glowering man-size and taking it all out on Nancy. He's a horribly selfish artist in Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), but he's painting something beautiful out of a man's dying; I can't really speak to his Ancient Pistol in Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) because I haven't seen it since high school, but he takes a stock character in Robert Wise's The Desert Rats (1953) and makes him real in directions the audience isn't trained to expect. I find him very impressive for similar reasons in Edward Dmytryk's Obsession (1949), because the murderer's role is written to chew scenery and he plays it as low-key as if killing a man were as serious small-scale business as a model railway, and although Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) is a deeply flawed film, it gives Newton the chance to play for once the sweet, brave, true hero, an officer of the law undercover in a gang of wreckers, being rescued by Maureen O'Hara and looking not bad at all with his shirt half ripped off from the sea, and there's nothing starchy or saccharine about him. There are many films of his I haven't seen. This Happy Breed (1944), for example, is one of the legendary collaborations between Noël Coward and David Lean and it's only just become available on Region 1 DVD. I can't find more than a minute of the biopic They Flew Alone (1942) even on YouTube. I probably don't need to see Long John Silver (1954). And he drank too much and he died at age fifty and I am sorry every time I remember that, because he was really, really talented and it is not fair to remember him only for pirate movies. If this was not the best exegesis of Robert Newton ever, at least you get the idea.

(And now, because I have to call doctors and housing-related people tomorrow, I am going to sleep.)