So from Monday until Wednesday I had a cancer scare, and on Wednesday I learned some non-fatal but upsetting news about a different part of my health, and on Thursday nothing medically traumatizing happened to me at all, but I had to go out to Quincy and back on the trains for yet another doctor's appointment and that pretty much ate the afternoon. So that's why the radio silence around here. Thank you to everyone who left a media recommendation in my latest post.
Last night, finding that all eight seasons of Foyle's War (2002–) are currently available on Netflix, I rewatched the third-season episode "Enemy Fire" to see if it was as good as I'd remembered from years ago on PBS. Short answer: yes. It's the one with the thinly veiled versions of Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pig Club, here a requisitioned manor house in Hastings full of badly burned airmen under the care of Dr. Patrick Jamieson (Bill Paterson), an outspoken plastic surgeon whose pioneering treatments include saline baths, skin grafts, and treating his patients like ordinary people, not objects of pity or horror. The resolution of the mystery—who is responsible for the escalating acts of sabotage at Digby Manor, including one attempted murder and one successful one—is only so-so, but everything about the airmen themselves is great. Jamieson has all the time in the world for his patients and none for anyone who tries to interfere with their treatment. Flight Lieutenant Johnny Bridges (John Lloyd Fillingham) is missing the use of his fingers and most of his original face, but he's a jaunty, outrageous flirt who wears his officer's greatcoat over his pajamas with a rakish red scarf, well aware of the irony when he sneaks cigarettes to smoke where he won't be a fire risk; his sparring relationship with brisk Matron Grace Petrie (Dearbhla Molloy) has all the tart-tongued affection of screwball comedy, never directly acknowledged. The night of the hospital concert party, they stop the show with a Coward-esque duet: Paris without the Eiffel Tower, spring without an April shower . . . I just can't imagine what the world would be like without you. I had remembered a sudden turn of sympathy for the martinet Group Captain Smythe (Peter Blythe) and I was right, but I liked the chance to observe how it was done.
Smythe is the antagonist of the A-plot, assigned to evaluate Jamieson's work for the RAF. A sharp-faced, greying man with an astringent tenor voice, everything about him is disapproval and asperity. He doesn't like the concert parties, the beer on tap, the relaxing of military discipline or the absence of correct hospital uniform (Jamieson destroyed them), he doesn't appreciate the doctor's unconcealed contempt for authority (which very definitely includes the Group Captain himself), and he makes it quite clear that while he can't fault Jamieson as a surgeon, he can condemn everything else about the man's practice. He promises to put it all in his report to the Ministry. We recognize his type at once: the stiff-necked stickler with no imagination to speak of, who would rather subject wounded men to further hurt and humiliation than unbend a fraction of the chain of command. It's no use arguing with him; he probably can't even hear a request that doesn't come with a requisition form. We're just as glad as Jamieson to see him go. And then, as he's leaving to make his report, someone pushes a piece of statuary off the roof onto him.
It doesn't hit him. It's probably much harder than most people think to kill someone by pushing statuary off a roof. It smashes the bonnet of the car he's just gotten into. And we cut to a shot of Smythe through the car window, while chunks of stone are still bouncing to the driveway. All through his previous scenes, we've seen him narrow-eyed and unpersuaded, looking down his nose at everything; now his eyes are wide, shocked, and he covers his mouth with one gloved hand, breathing hard. It's no more than a moment. Later dialogue never refers to the emotions of the scene; Smythe is clipped when discussing the incident and only looks disapproving when a sketch at the next night's concert party sends up his near-miss. ("Something has terrible has happened. Someone has dropped a statue on Group Captain Smythe!"—"That is terrible."—"You're telling me. They missed!") His demeanor doesn't warm over the course of the episode, even by the finale when he reveals that he's thrown his approval behind Jamieson's unorthodox methods; his parting "Good luck" is as dry and cool as his initial "Very good, thank you." But for just those few critical seconds, he is scared and shaken and human and we know he's real, all without a word. Peter Cushing couldn't have done it better.
(Oh, man. I looked up the actor just now, curious what else he'd done, and found he died in 2004. The episode aired posthumously. He was in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), which I was not expecting.)
When I described this scene to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel, he pointed out the cleverness of the writers in choosing to drop the statue on an unsympathetic character instead of a sympathetic one: if the popular Bridges or the indispensable Petrie were almost smashed to flinders, naturally everyone would be upset, but there's an entirely different spectrum of reactions available if nobody would have much missed the intended recipient of half a ton of gargoyle. (In fact, Jamieson mostly views the resulting police investigation as an irritant and an inconvenience; he cares more that someone is trying to get his hospital shut down. He's even more annoyed when an actual corpse turns up.) And without any need for a confessional exchange or a conventionally humanizing moment, it offers the audience the first hint that Smythe is not the impervious dummy he acts like. It moves the mystery plot forward, of course, but so do several other developments. This is the one that crystallizes a character and the community he's temporarily part of. And that sort of thing is always very neat to see.
Last night, finding that all eight seasons of Foyle's War (2002–) are currently available on Netflix, I rewatched the third-season episode "Enemy Fire" to see if it was as good as I'd remembered from years ago on PBS. Short answer: yes. It's the one with the thinly veiled versions of Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pig Club, here a requisitioned manor house in Hastings full of badly burned airmen under the care of Dr. Patrick Jamieson (Bill Paterson), an outspoken plastic surgeon whose pioneering treatments include saline baths, skin grafts, and treating his patients like ordinary people, not objects of pity or horror. The resolution of the mystery—who is responsible for the escalating acts of sabotage at Digby Manor, including one attempted murder and one successful one—is only so-so, but everything about the airmen themselves is great. Jamieson has all the time in the world for his patients and none for anyone who tries to interfere with their treatment. Flight Lieutenant Johnny Bridges (John Lloyd Fillingham) is missing the use of his fingers and most of his original face, but he's a jaunty, outrageous flirt who wears his officer's greatcoat over his pajamas with a rakish red scarf, well aware of the irony when he sneaks cigarettes to smoke where he won't be a fire risk; his sparring relationship with brisk Matron Grace Petrie (Dearbhla Molloy) has all the tart-tongued affection of screwball comedy, never directly acknowledged. The night of the hospital concert party, they stop the show with a Coward-esque duet: Paris without the Eiffel Tower, spring without an April shower . . . I just can't imagine what the world would be like without you. I had remembered a sudden turn of sympathy for the martinet Group Captain Smythe (Peter Blythe) and I was right, but I liked the chance to observe how it was done.
Smythe is the antagonist of the A-plot, assigned to evaluate Jamieson's work for the RAF. A sharp-faced, greying man with an astringent tenor voice, everything about him is disapproval and asperity. He doesn't like the concert parties, the beer on tap, the relaxing of military discipline or the absence of correct hospital uniform (Jamieson destroyed them), he doesn't appreciate the doctor's unconcealed contempt for authority (which very definitely includes the Group Captain himself), and he makes it quite clear that while he can't fault Jamieson as a surgeon, he can condemn everything else about the man's practice. He promises to put it all in his report to the Ministry. We recognize his type at once: the stiff-necked stickler with no imagination to speak of, who would rather subject wounded men to further hurt and humiliation than unbend a fraction of the chain of command. It's no use arguing with him; he probably can't even hear a request that doesn't come with a requisition form. We're just as glad as Jamieson to see him go. And then, as he's leaving to make his report, someone pushes a piece of statuary off the roof onto him.
It doesn't hit him. It's probably much harder than most people think to kill someone by pushing statuary off a roof. It smashes the bonnet of the car he's just gotten into. And we cut to a shot of Smythe through the car window, while chunks of stone are still bouncing to the driveway. All through his previous scenes, we've seen him narrow-eyed and unpersuaded, looking down his nose at everything; now his eyes are wide, shocked, and he covers his mouth with one gloved hand, breathing hard. It's no more than a moment. Later dialogue never refers to the emotions of the scene; Smythe is clipped when discussing the incident and only looks disapproving when a sketch at the next night's concert party sends up his near-miss. ("Something has terrible has happened. Someone has dropped a statue on Group Captain Smythe!"—"That is terrible."—"You're telling me. They missed!") His demeanor doesn't warm over the course of the episode, even by the finale when he reveals that he's thrown his approval behind Jamieson's unorthodox methods; his parting "Good luck" is as dry and cool as his initial "Very good, thank you." But for just those few critical seconds, he is scared and shaken and human and we know he's real, all without a word. Peter Cushing couldn't have done it better.
(Oh, man. I looked up the actor just now, curious what else he'd done, and found he died in 2004. The episode aired posthumously. He was in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), which I was not expecting.)
When I described this scene to
derspatchel, he pointed out the cleverness of the writers in choosing to drop the statue on an unsympathetic character instead of a sympathetic one: if the popular Bridges or the indispensable Petrie were almost smashed to flinders, naturally everyone would be upset, but there's an entirely different spectrum of reactions available if nobody would have much missed the intended recipient of half a ton of gargoyle. (In fact, Jamieson mostly views the resulting police investigation as an irritant and an inconvenience; he cares more that someone is trying to get his hospital shut down. He's even more annoyed when an actual corpse turns up.) And without any need for a confessional exchange or a conventionally humanizing moment, it offers the audience the first hint that Smythe is not the impervious dummy he acts like. It moves the mystery plot forward, of course, but so do several other developments. This is the one that crystallizes a character and the community he's temporarily part of. And that sort of thing is always very neat to see.
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