Happy anniversary, Tiny Wittgenstein! Admittedly it would be a few weeks before ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ratatosk formally named you, but the basic concept was there. You have been very useful to me as a personification in all the months since and someday I hope you go away forever. Until that time, the fact that you generate fanart will never cease to amuse me.
Today's recovered note goes back even farther than the last one: April 2009, when I had just seen John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) for the first time. I meant to talk about the character I alluded to in comments and then, of course, never did.
I know Jack MacGowran is a chameleon, because I saw him first in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) as the screwloose Professor Abronsius who in his quest to prove the existence of vampires has dragged his hapless assistant Alfred into a grad student's nightmare in the wilds of Transylvania and all my memories of the character are tall and bendy—on beyond gangling, with exploding white hair and a mustache you could strain krill through, magnificently oblivious to anything outside the scope of his hobbyhorse. But if you ask me to describe Feeney from The Quiet Man (1952), I'll tell you he's a thin little ferret of a man without an ounce of spine, but philosophical about it. He has a curious, long-nosed, backswept face, and I would love to credit it to the actor's long relationship with Samuel Beckett that Feeney doesn't seem to operate in quite the same world as the rest of the cast, even allowing for the incredible non-resemblance of the film's Innisfree to any parish in actual Ireland ever. He has a plot function: he's the crony and general dogsbody of local squire and heavy Red Will Danaher, taking down the names of Danaher's enemies on command and striking a line through them, insisting on his master's rights at the pub ("Quiet, if you please! Parliamentary procedure—Squire Danaher has the floor") and then hustling him out before he pastes our unresisting hero ("Come, Squire, don't soil your knuckles on the man"), though he has to be called for first: told which way to jump. When Danaher spits in disgust on a new-washed floor, it's Feeney who drops to his knees and polishes industriously. But I can't think of anything he does that's as interesting as the watchful way he drifts around the village when he's not stuck to the squire's shadow, observing the story as if he had no stake in it. Mary Kate Danaher spies over a garden wall at Sean Thornton moving furniture into his ancestral cottage of White o' Morning, finds at her elbow Feeney in his faded raincoat and slouch hat pointing up her private thoughts with an apparent apostrophe: "Is that a bed or a parade ground? Oh, a man'd have to be a sprinter to catch his wife in a bed like that." As part of the morning-after party bringing over the material facts of Mary Kate's dowry, he sets her spinet down like a coffin with candles at its head and foot, sepulchrally greeting, "God bless all here."1 Exactly once we hear him talk back to his employer, fleetingly, converting a muttered "High time" (at the squire's uncharacteristic offer to buy the next round) into a hastily head-bobbing "I said, that's fine, Squire—fine, fine!" but he's roundly shooed off when he tries to slip the matchmaker-bookmaker Michaelín Flynn "a pound on Thornton against the Squire" in the climactic brawl: "Go away, ye traitor, ye!" I get weird little Shakespeare-clown flickers off him. He's the first to scatter whenever a fight breaks out and he quietly drinks someone else's pint at the bar when no one's looking. His curtain call is a brow-quirked, knowing glance to the camera. There are ways in which he's entirely pointless and possibly the best thing in the film and I want a time machine for MacGowran's Lucky, but failing that I'll see what I can find on YouTube.
1. Feeney dressed for church is conspicuous by his disheveled air and his truly awful tie, a sort of lozenge-striped licorice pattern. I made a note of it at the time, but I have a better benchmark for bad ties these days and you know, Feeney's is still terrible.
There in fact appears to be a television version of MacGowran's legendary Beginning to End (The Works of Samuel Beckett) online. And wouldn't have been a couple of years ago, it looks like. And hasn't been taken down since. Excuse me while I take advantage of the transient blessings of copyright violation and then go bake a cheesecake.
ratatosk formally named you, but the basic concept was there. You have been very useful to me as a personification in all the months since and someday I hope you go away forever. Until that time, the fact that you generate fanart will never cease to amuse me.Today's recovered note goes back even farther than the last one: April 2009, when I had just seen John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) for the first time. I meant to talk about the character I alluded to in comments and then, of course, never did.
I know Jack MacGowran is a chameleon, because I saw him first in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) as the screwloose Professor Abronsius who in his quest to prove the existence of vampires has dragged his hapless assistant Alfred into a grad student's nightmare in the wilds of Transylvania and all my memories of the character are tall and bendy—on beyond gangling, with exploding white hair and a mustache you could strain krill through, magnificently oblivious to anything outside the scope of his hobbyhorse. But if you ask me to describe Feeney from The Quiet Man (1952), I'll tell you he's a thin little ferret of a man without an ounce of spine, but philosophical about it. He has a curious, long-nosed, backswept face, and I would love to credit it to the actor's long relationship with Samuel Beckett that Feeney doesn't seem to operate in quite the same world as the rest of the cast, even allowing for the incredible non-resemblance of the film's Innisfree to any parish in actual Ireland ever. He has a plot function: he's the crony and general dogsbody of local squire and heavy Red Will Danaher, taking down the names of Danaher's enemies on command and striking a line through them, insisting on his master's rights at the pub ("Quiet, if you please! Parliamentary procedure—Squire Danaher has the floor") and then hustling him out before he pastes our unresisting hero ("Come, Squire, don't soil your knuckles on the man"), though he has to be called for first: told which way to jump. When Danaher spits in disgust on a new-washed floor, it's Feeney who drops to his knees and polishes industriously. But I can't think of anything he does that's as interesting as the watchful way he drifts around the village when he's not stuck to the squire's shadow, observing the story as if he had no stake in it. Mary Kate Danaher spies over a garden wall at Sean Thornton moving furniture into his ancestral cottage of White o' Morning, finds at her elbow Feeney in his faded raincoat and slouch hat pointing up her private thoughts with an apparent apostrophe: "Is that a bed or a parade ground? Oh, a man'd have to be a sprinter to catch his wife in a bed like that." As part of the morning-after party bringing over the material facts of Mary Kate's dowry, he sets her spinet down like a coffin with candles at its head and foot, sepulchrally greeting, "God bless all here."1 Exactly once we hear him talk back to his employer, fleetingly, converting a muttered "High time" (at the squire's uncharacteristic offer to buy the next round) into a hastily head-bobbing "I said, that's fine, Squire—fine, fine!" but he's roundly shooed off when he tries to slip the matchmaker-bookmaker Michaelín Flynn "a pound on Thornton against the Squire" in the climactic brawl: "Go away, ye traitor, ye!" I get weird little Shakespeare-clown flickers off him. He's the first to scatter whenever a fight breaks out and he quietly drinks someone else's pint at the bar when no one's looking. His curtain call is a brow-quirked, knowing glance to the camera. There are ways in which he's entirely pointless and possibly the best thing in the film and I want a time machine for MacGowran's Lucky, but failing that I'll see what I can find on YouTube.
1. Feeney dressed for church is conspicuous by his disheveled air and his truly awful tie, a sort of lozenge-striped licorice pattern. I made a note of it at the time, but I have a better benchmark for bad ties these days and you know, Feeney's is still terrible.
There in fact appears to be a television version of MacGowran's legendary Beginning to End (The Works of Samuel Beckett) online. And wouldn't have been a couple of years ago, it looks like. And hasn't been taken down since. Excuse me while I take advantage of the transient blessings of copyright violation and then go bake a cheesecake.
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