I suppose I am going through more than a mild phase of Colin Jeavons when I just watched "To Set a Deadly Fashion," the episode of Adam Adamant Lives! (1966–67) in which Jeavons plays the campest fashion designer I have encountered since Anatole of Paris. Technically there is a plot concerning bugged and lethal haute couture, but mostly there's the snippily explosive Roger Clair, the kind of prima donna villain who encourages the hero to comply nicely with his own murder because "the sight of blood puts me on tranquilizers for weeks" and spits with fury, "Oh, I think I'm going to faint!" I would love to have shoved him in a room with Roddy McDowall and seen if any of the scenery survived. I wouldn't have bet on it. The final fight scene was, as promised, completely silly. Why are both television versions of Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1938) apparently lost? The 1963 one starred Jeavons, the 1953 Peter Cushing. I'd take either. I'm not picky. Have some links.
1. In terms of queer film history, it is a relatively big deal that Magnus Hirschfeld's Gesetze der Liebe (1927) has been rediscovered and restored. I knew about the survival of the condensed version of Anders als die Andern (1919)—it stars Conrad Veidt—but I had never heard that any of the rest of the later film escaped the Nazi destruction of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. I still hope the full version of Anders als die Andern will surface some day from another archive. My usual wishful phrase here is a broom closet in Argentina, but Hirschfeld's films should never be in a closet of any kind.
2. I hope there will be some kind of broadcast of Matthew Bourne's The Midnight Bell, since I love the idea of a ballet adapted primarily from Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1929–34). When I discovered his fiction and specifically that trilogy in 2010, I hoped it would do something to my brain, and years after the fact it turned out that it had.
3. I was delighted to find out from Tumblr that there will be a film about Operation Mincemeat, but since it is based on the book by Ben Macintyre, I have especially high expectations for the level of onscreen shenanigans. I am hoping its release will finally prompt me to watch The Man Who Never Was (1956), which I have meant to do for decades.
I meant to write more about my weekend with my niece and her friends, who seem to have attached to me to the point that they meowed at the door as soon as they heard that I was awake on Saturday and mobbed me as soon as I stepped outside—I almost got my hair braided by at least two people at once. There was a block party which I attended for a nerve-racking fifteen minutes, during which I watched a scrum of small children play something with boffer swords and portable soccer nets that looked a lot like Calvinball. I have promised not to watch the last half-hour of Splash (1984) without my niece. This afternoon was the first in-person rehearsal of A Besere Velt since the late winter of 2020; although I am remaining remote for now, it was good to sing the music with people I could hear again. I can't figure out where my last week went. I worry it was into my job. I need it to be into sleep.
1. In terms of queer film history, it is a relatively big deal that Magnus Hirschfeld's Gesetze der Liebe (1927) has been rediscovered and restored. I knew about the survival of the condensed version of Anders als die Andern (1919)—it stars Conrad Veidt—but I had never heard that any of the rest of the later film escaped the Nazi destruction of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. I still hope the full version of Anders als die Andern will surface some day from another archive. My usual wishful phrase here is a broom closet in Argentina, but Hirschfeld's films should never be in a closet of any kind.
2. I hope there will be some kind of broadcast of Matthew Bourne's The Midnight Bell, since I love the idea of a ballet adapted primarily from Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1929–34). When I discovered his fiction and specifically that trilogy in 2010, I hoped it would do something to my brain, and years after the fact it turned out that it had.
3. I was delighted to find out from Tumblr that there will be a film about Operation Mincemeat, but since it is based on the book by Ben Macintyre, I have especially high expectations for the level of onscreen shenanigans. I am hoping its release will finally prompt me to watch The Man Who Never Was (1956), which I have meant to do for decades.
I meant to write more about my weekend with my niece and her friends, who seem to have attached to me to the point that they meowed at the door as soon as they heard that I was awake on Saturday and mobbed me as soon as I stepped outside—I almost got my hair braided by at least two people at once. There was a block party which I attended for a nerve-racking fifteen minutes, during which I watched a scrum of small children play something with boffer swords and portable soccer nets that looked a lot like Calvinball. I have promised not to watch the last half-hour of Splash (1984) without my niece. This afternoon was the first in-person rehearsal of A Besere Velt since the late winter of 2020; although I am remaining remote for now, it was good to sing the music with people I could hear again. I can't figure out where my last week went. I worry it was into my job. I need it to be into sleep.
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