Happy Labor Day! The sunprints were a hit with my niece and the twins. Ferns, maple leaves, red clover, yew twigs, asters, cookie cutters, iris leaves, scissors, and unidentified wildflowers were all involved. I did an elm leaf.
1. Thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
konstantya's indispensable studies of vintage crime and romance pulp, I have been made aware of one of the more impressive radiations of the Scarlet Pimpernel through pulp literature, by which I do not mean the periodic recollection of pop culture that the public persona of Bruce Wayne is canonically a himbo, but everything about the character of Lace Flowers, the daintily monikered hero of Beth Farrell's "Lady Snob" (1936). Not only is he fair-haired and willowy and so effetely English that he goes around with one brow quizzically arched as though he's wearing a monocle, he has violet eyes and a face to match his exquisite taste in clothes and doesn't contradict the heroine when she calls him a sissy. She detests his whimsical smile, his lazy conceit, his sheer prettiness, and yet she can't help observing that even as he flutters inconsequentially around her father's nightclub, charming the debutantes and knowing far too much about roses, he moves like a panther and his slender hands are strong as surprising steel. In the dangerous situation which provides the scaffolding of the plot, he's unruffled and resourceful, which does not stop him from talking nonsense all the while he's doing something useful. Inevitably she begins to wonder, "Did every man have another man behind his mask?" and then if she'll ever be allowed to catch more than a glimpse of the Lace who exists beyond his guise of "a silver-tongued trifler without a thought above nonsense." I constellated him in a zeptosecond with Wimsey and Campion, I haven't a clue if Farrell did. Tragically, the story appears to be a one-off. I demand at least fic.
2. Gayle Hunnicutt has died. I don't think I ever saw her in more than two roles, but since one of them was a susceptible, tenacious witness to the paranormal in The Legend of Hell House (1973) and the other was the definitive Irene Adler in the Granada Sherlock Holmes' "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1984), I will miss her.
3. I had not previously known there was an Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, but their offerings include Haketia and Judeo-Greek.
John Farrow and Richard Fleischer's His Kind of Woman (1951) was famously messed about with by Howard Hughes to the point where after a year of shooting and re-shooting and re-reshooting Vincent Price threw an anniversary party on set, whichspatch and I knew when we decided to watch it last night, but we did not realize that its amiably wacky brand of south-of-the-border noir would escalate to such a pitch of WTF Guignol that by the middle of the third act we were calling it Alan Swann vs. the Melbourne Method and found ourselves quoting Mel Brooks in The Muppet Movie (1979) at one late-breaking development of totally unforeshadowed mad science. We were already saying the title in Animal's voice. Mitchum and Jane Russell are magnificent as usual; the movie itself is gorgeously shot, inventively staged, and n-v-t-s bananas. In the long run it may have been a good thing that Hughes kept building extra sets because Price probably ate most of them.
1. Thanks to
konstantya's indispensable studies of vintage crime and romance pulp, I have been made aware of one of the more impressive radiations of the Scarlet Pimpernel through pulp literature, by which I do not mean the periodic recollection of pop culture that the public persona of Bruce Wayne is canonically a himbo, but everything about the character of Lace Flowers, the daintily monikered hero of Beth Farrell's "Lady Snob" (1936). Not only is he fair-haired and willowy and so effetely English that he goes around with one brow quizzically arched as though he's wearing a monocle, he has violet eyes and a face to match his exquisite taste in clothes and doesn't contradict the heroine when she calls him a sissy. She detests his whimsical smile, his lazy conceit, his sheer prettiness, and yet she can't help observing that even as he flutters inconsequentially around her father's nightclub, charming the debutantes and knowing far too much about roses, he moves like a panther and his slender hands are strong as surprising steel. In the dangerous situation which provides the scaffolding of the plot, he's unruffled and resourceful, which does not stop him from talking nonsense all the while he's doing something useful. Inevitably she begins to wonder, "Did every man have another man behind his mask?" and then if she'll ever be allowed to catch more than a glimpse of the Lace who exists beyond his guise of "a silver-tongued trifler without a thought above nonsense." I constellated him in a zeptosecond with Wimsey and Campion, I haven't a clue if Farrell did. Tragically, the story appears to be a one-off. I demand at least fic.2. Gayle Hunnicutt has died. I don't think I ever saw her in more than two roles, but since one of them was a susceptible, tenacious witness to the paranormal in The Legend of Hell House (1973) and the other was the definitive Irene Adler in the Granada Sherlock Holmes' "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1984), I will miss her.
3. I had not previously known there was an Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, but their offerings include Haketia and Judeo-Greek.
John Farrow and Richard Fleischer's His Kind of Woman (1951) was famously messed about with by Howard Hughes to the point where after a year of shooting and re-shooting and re-reshooting Vincent Price threw an anniversary party on set, which
spatch and I knew when we decided to watch it last night, but we did not realize that its amiably wacky brand of south-of-the-border noir would escalate to such a pitch of WTF Guignol that by the middle of the third act we were calling it Alan Swann vs. the Melbourne Method and found ourselves quoting Mel Brooks in The Muppet Movie (1979) at one late-breaking development of totally unforeshadowed mad science. We were already saying the title in Animal's voice. Mitchum and Jane Russell are magnificent as usual; the movie itself is gorgeously shot, inventively staged, and n-v-t-s bananas. In the long run it may have been a good thing that Hughes kept building extra sets because Price probably ate most of them.
