On my way home in the icy mixed rain that passes for our latter-day nor'easter, I found a twig of flowering tree on a streetlit lawn. There was no evidence of the rest of the tree. I brought it home for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch.
spatch.
2024-04-03
In honor of Leslie Howard's birthday of a hundred and thirty-one years, please enjoy one of my favorite pictures of him. It comes from the set of The Gentle Sex (1943), the last film in which he appeared and the last whose direction he completed in his life; he cast himself as the omnisciently fallible narrator, confidently wrong every time about the capabilities of women in war. The camera glimpses just once over his shoulder as he selects his cast who will confound him, raincoat-clad like the eternal Henry Higgins. Offscreen—
He doesn't look like the more than matinée idol, the numinous national symbol who had appeared for the last time to the British public as Nelson on the steps of St Paul's. He looks like the eagerly charming weirdo described by so many slightly bemused interviews of the 1930's, the one who always seems to have been an anorak for photography and dressed in the same careless clothes and couldn't dance and really needed glasses and was dead-ahead unstoppable about anything in which he was really interested and the definition of a luftmentsh about everything in which he wasn't: how it delights me that he carried the romantic laurels of his day. I have wanted for years to know the films he would have made if he had lived past fifty, even past the war. Pictures like this one don't make me want them any less.
He doesn't look like the more than matinée idol, the numinous national symbol who had appeared for the last time to the British public as Nelson on the steps of St Paul's. He looks like the eagerly charming weirdo described by so many slightly bemused interviews of the 1930's, the one who always seems to have been an anorak for photography and dressed in the same careless clothes and couldn't dance and really needed glasses and was dead-ahead unstoppable about anything in which he was really interested and the definition of a luftmentsh about everything in which he wasn't: how it delights me that he carried the romantic laurels of his day. I have wanted for years to know the films he would have made if he had lived past fifty, even past the war. Pictures like this one don't make me want them any less.