I've found I cradle things that make me weak

The last two days of the week were very busy with appointments and then Saturday it snowed, which was unnecessary. I have been self-medicating a lot with classical art and movies off TCM. The former involves visiting the MFA, downloading collection and exhibition catalogues from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and re-reading Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea (1962), incidentally confirming that I really don't like it very much. It doesn't hold the same deep numinous charge as The King Must Die; it's a bitter novel, a more disjointed one, and its repeated themes of failure and decline feel like a stacked deck rather than the toppling balance of tragedy. I'm not convinced that every mythological appearance by Theseus after the Labyrinth needed to fit into the same book. I like her Oedipus, but not her Antigone; I keep forgetting about the Kentaurs and the Lapiths; for all his brotherly comradeship with Theseus, Pirithoos never registers as vividly as any of the Cranes or even the doomed year-kings of Eleusis and Naxos in the first novel. The heart of the novel is the love of Theseus and Hippolyta and that works, I think, partly because Renault writes them like a queer romance. To Hippolyta, she gives the king's death of the consenting sacrifice. She is less generous to Phaedra than even Seneca. I have moved on to Fire from Heaven (1969), which is all kinds of romantic about Alexander, but at least doesn't make me scream about Olympias.

(In the meanwhile, strange_selkie tags things like this for me, which just makes everything better.)

I am about a dozen movies behind on reviews I wanted to write, so these are sort of the thumbnail sketch notes of some recent highlights. Enjoy.

Even TCM couldn't tell me how Wonder Man (1945) ended up as unmemorably titled as it did. It's a shame, because the movie kept me at my computer until two in the morning. In his second feature film, Danny Kaye double-stars as a mild-mannered classical historian possessed by the ghost of his nightclub entertainer twin brother in order to testify against the gangsters who whacked him. It's a classic slapstick premise—the shnook sharing a body with the tummler—but it's played much less broadly here than in many of Kaye's later vehicles, so that we're actually sorry that mile-a-minute wild card Buzzy Bellew got dumped off a bridge in Prospect Park before he could finally tie the knot with fellow dancer Midge (Vera-Ellen) and his posthumous reappearance is a visible catastrophe for the contentedly geeky Edwin Dingle, who's quite happy researching the history of human knowledge and cooking at home on a first date with librarian Ellen (Virginia Mayo). Some of the possession scenes are comic body horror. Some are just cute, as when Edwin's inexperience with alcohol gives his dybbuk brother a wicked hangover. The finale is when things get totally out of hand, as they should. Grand opera is involved. If you ever wanted to know where Tom Lehrer's self-interrupting "I am never forget" shtick in "Lobachevsky" came from, it's this movie. I would love to know if Kaye brought the routine with him from vaudeville: a Russian singer with hay fever who has to perform "Ochi Chornya" next to a giant vase of flowers.

The primary virtues of Born to Dance (1936) have nothing to do with the plot, which is a kind of proto-On the Town following the adventures of three sailors on shore leave and the women two of them are attached to; they are the dazzling athleticism of Eleanor Powell, the comedy dancing of Buddy Ebsen and the scene-stealing interjection of Reginald Gardiner as a Central Park beat cop who fancies himself the Toscanini of imaginary orchestras, and the fact that James Stewart can actually sing. derspatchel and I watched the film partly just because we had no idea he'd ever been in musical comedy. He's no triple threat, but he acquires himself well. He can waltz a little, tap a little; he doesn't need to do much more with Powell's firecracker thirty-second-notes there for the camera to marvel at. Singing, he has a light, sweet, earnest sound, very much in the same register as his speaking voice; Cole Porter picked him and defended him against dubbing by the studio. I didn't realize he'd introduced "You'd Be So Easy to Love," but there it is. ("I've Got You Under My Skin" also comes from this movie, but I am incapable of not thinking of that song as definitively performed by the Muppets. I admit I was also distracted by the presence of the Sparton "Bluebird" radio prominently in shot. I'd last seen it in the MFA.) I recognized Ebsen by his dancing. I didn't know what he looked like; I knew he'd been cast originally as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz (1939), then swapped roles with Ray Bolger for the Tin Man and then famously suffered an allergic reaction to the aluminum-based makeup and dropped out of the film altogether. So when we got to the first major dance number and out came this lanky ragdoll who looked like he never knew what his knees were doing and the direction of his feet surprised him, I knew who it had to be. He has one of the most endearing unibrows I've ever seen. Apparently he grew up to be in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), but I feel like the trauma occasioned by Mr. Yunioshi wiped out a lot of that film for me.

Here are two things we didn't know about White Zombie (1932) when we started watching it: it's the first zombie feature film and it's good. The zombies are the Haitian folkloric kind, under the control of plantation owner/self-taught bokor Bela Lugosi who employs his former enemies as mindless bodyguards and runs his sugar mill on the unsleeping labor of black and white bodies, enslaved even after death; it's pre-Code horror, so a grisly scene shows us the brutal indifference with which Legendre's zombies become literally grist for the mill. It's fantastically atmospheric, shot like a silent film with expressionist shadows and crystalline camera work. The sound work is brilliant when it's relying on effects and accompanying music; dialogue scenes are frequently so clunky that I wondered briefly if the movie had started life as a silent and been awkwardly brought up to date halfway through, but I think it's mostly that the technology was rudimentary and two of the four leads were visibly most comfortable in scenes where they don't have to talk. They're very good when they're not talking, though, while Lugosi's mannered, menacing delivery makes him perhaps an even more mesmerizing villain than Dracula. A perfect ending is strongly implied and then completely averted, leading both of us to wonder if the studio had actually stepped in at the last minute. It's worth seeing even so, and way less racist than I was expecting from the title. In retrospect, I am even happier that I screened Rob Zombie's "Living Dead Girl" (1999) as a short before the feature.

I had wanted to see The Citadel (1938) ever since I caught five minutes out of the middle on TCM in 2012. It was worth the wait, even if it turns out to be one of those movies that feel slightly like two different stories shoved into the same two hours. I haven't read the 1937 novel by A.J. Cronin, so I can't say whether the two halves are better integrated there. (I was able to verify that the movie and the book fridge different characters and I dislike both deaths for different reasons, so we're back to the discussion about how representation should not be a zero-sum game. I understand that when your subject is medical incompetence, the stakes are going to be disability or death, but I still object on grounds of liking both characters.) In the first, Robert Donat is an idealistic young doctor newly arrived at a Welsh mining village where the bureaucracy is so corrupt that the company finds it more cost-effective to keep replacing miners than to replace the old leaky sewer that's giving them typhoid in the first place; initially timid, he's encouraged to activism by the friendship of cynical, hard-drinking Ralph Richardson, a man who knows his way around a Molotov cocktail, and eventually the love of schoolteacher Rosalind Russell, who's as much fellow-researcher as wife. He's acknowledged the best doctor the valley ever had, but presently his scientific righteousness edges out his ability to hear the concerns of the community he serves, and his most important research goes for naught when a clash of personalities busts up his laboratory. In the second, he's a disillusioned young doctor newly arrived in London where the medical establishment is so corrupt that he finds himself paid more for slapping a spoiled heiress out of a temper tantrum than he ever received for his painstaking experiments proving the link between long-term exposure to coal dust and lung disease; initially principled, he's encouraged to a kind of professional coasting by the social connections of old schoolfellow Rex Harrison, very sleek and plausible, and the successful model of high-society surgeon Cecil Parker, whose patients are all very wealthy and very healthy and very generous. He does little harm, being paid for his well-developed bedside manner, but he doesn't do much good, and it takes his wife and his best friend calling him on it with tragic results before he wakes up. The happy ending is a reclamation of his ethics and a balance achieved between furthering knowledge and helping people in need, but the story feels like it zigzags a bit getting him there. The five minutes I'd seen only included Donat, Russell, and Harrison, so Ralph Richardson came as a delightful surprise, turning the character actor's trick of taking a stock figure and making them three-dimensional. He's the actor of whom my husband most reminded me when we met.

Stage Fright (1950) was a Hitchcock film I'd never heard of, a backstage murder mystery that verges at several points on self-parody before resolving into genuine and marvelous suspense; it stars the unusual combination of Jane Wyman, Michael Wilding, Marlene Dietrich, and Alastair Sim. The protagonist is a RADA student who finds herself playing too many roles after impulsively agreeing to help a fellow-student who claims to have been framed for murder, posing as substitute maid and dresser to the cabaret star her friend swears really committed the crime while pretending to the investigating detective inspector—with whom she is forming a decidedly unprofessional bond, having met him as herself before knowing his job—that she has no connections whatsoever to the case. There's also the small matter of having stashed her friend on her father's houseboat (later in the spare room of her mother's town house, which doesn't help matters when the detective comes to tea) and finding herself susceptible to blackmail by the actual dresser, who saw right through her initial pretense of being a journalist trying to get a woman's-eye view on the story. Everything comes to a head on the stage, as it should. In the meantime a lot of theater in-jokes fly around, Marlene Dietrich performs the number that Madeline Kahn spoofed in Blazing Saddles (1974)—"The Laziest Girl in Town"; Rob and I both failed to keep from interjecting "Can't you see she's pooped?" and "Everything below the waist is kaput!"—Alastair Sim steals all of his scenes as a father magnificently indulgent of his daughter's amateur sleuthing, being the sort of man who's still personally offended that the Revenuers never came after him for smuggling two casks of brandy twenty years ago, Kay Walsh steals all of her scenes as a confidently unscrupulous woman with a skewering eye for class condescension, and it took me until IMDb to recognize Michael Wilding from Cottage to Let (1941). I am delighted that he was a romantic lead; with his thin height and his narrow, sharp-nosed profile, he could as easily have been typed as rabbity ganglers like Freddy Eynsford-Hill or shady informants rather than London's finest, but no, very popular star of British film in the late '40's and '50's.

I am probably going to go watch some other obscure movie now. [edit] TCM is temporarily not playing on my computer, so we watched a DVD of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Les Vacances de M. Hulot, 1953), a favorite film of Rob's which I had not seen since 2010. It's the most relaxing movie I know that ends with an unplanned explosion of fireworks.