As I wrote to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elisem who is asking for good things, Autolycus sat on my desk for hours this afternoon and chattered like a Siamese-voiced machine gun at the fat sparrow just out of reach in the yew tree beyond my office window. It was fluffed out round with the cold and should obviously have been in his mouth. He batted at the glass; the sparrow fluttered away; it returned and he renewed his chatter. Only when it became too dark to see if the sparrow was still there did he lose the hunting hunch of a cat ready to spring through double glazing in pursuit of delicious prey.
More than the film noir in which capacity which the Criterion Channel has collected it for Noirvember, Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) is a post-war Gothic which throws a successful shadow across the refugee dream of American sanctuary but somehow makes less than it should of the ironies of its heroine's imposture without which she would never have been plunged into an old-fashioned inheritance murder complete with endangered child and ambiguous ardor of the master of the house, but since it introduced Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortese to one another such that their marriage would take him to Italy for most of the rest of the decade where Fellini could spot him visiting his wife on the set of a movie he wasn't even making and I could discover him decades later in La strada (1954), I'm fine with it. William Lundigan continues to be much less interesting when he's supposed to be heroic.
I grew up watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with my grandparents, so I am familiar with the phenomenon whereby as soon as Santa brings up the rear of the floats and the balloons and the Rockettes, open season on Christmas has officially begun, but I may have maxed out already on the carols and popular songs that have been filtering down through our ceiling all afternoon. "Santa Baby" three times in the same hour is a lot, with or without the yacht.
elisem who is asking for good things, Autolycus sat on my desk for hours this afternoon and chattered like a Siamese-voiced machine gun at the fat sparrow just out of reach in the yew tree beyond my office window. It was fluffed out round with the cold and should obviously have been in his mouth. He batted at the glass; the sparrow fluttered away; it returned and he renewed his chatter. Only when it became too dark to see if the sparrow was still there did he lose the hunting hunch of a cat ready to spring through double glazing in pursuit of delicious prey.More than the film noir in which capacity which the Criterion Channel has collected it for Noirvember, Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) is a post-war Gothic which throws a successful shadow across the refugee dream of American sanctuary but somehow makes less than it should of the ironies of its heroine's imposture without which she would never have been plunged into an old-fashioned inheritance murder complete with endangered child and ambiguous ardor of the master of the house, but since it introduced Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortese to one another such that their marriage would take him to Italy for most of the rest of the decade where Fellini could spot him visiting his wife on the set of a movie he wasn't even making and I could discover him decades later in La strada (1954), I'm fine with it. William Lundigan continues to be much less interesting when he's supposed to be heroic.
I grew up watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with my grandparents, so I am familiar with the phenomenon whereby as soon as Santa brings up the rear of the floats and the balloons and the Rockettes, open season on Christmas has officially begun, but I may have maxed out already on the carols and popular songs that have been filtering down through our ceiling all afternoon. "Santa Baby" three times in the same hour is a lot, with or without the yacht.
