I seem to have ended the day under the impression of a lead weight, but before then ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I finally saw Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) at the Somerville Theatre, where it looked gorgeously shadowed and bleached on 35 mm and remains essentially stuck between the tight-wired claustrophobia of its radio original and the more expansively Gothic noir its rationale for murder has complicated into, although Barbara Stanwyck does her white-knuckled best to bridge them. Because it was produced by Hal Wallis for Paramount, I appreciate the fix of Wendell Corey my brain did not have to dream up for me. Poor Dr. Alexander, who thought he was only in a normally Freudian post-war marital psychodrama. In Hitchcock it would have killed him, but thanks to Lucille Fletcher he's just going to have a bad morning when he sees the news.
I have not seen the two-strip Technicolor 1922 Anna May Wong film from which Sally Wen Mao's "The Toll of the Sea" (2015) takes its title and the palette of its argument, but I am very struck by the poem. Over the weekend I made an honest effort to watch Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and even for Wong and Sessue Hayakawa I wiped out on the high-test Orientalism of the plot. The internet informs me that unless you count the tragic ending, they don't even end up together. That cannot be more insulting than Warner Oland's Fu Manchu, but it feels like it.
I keep tapping at B. Pladek's "The Spindle of Necessity" (2024), partly because I am not the target audience while knowing all the references. As a short story, it reads like a direct interrogation of its author's relationship with the life and works of Mary Renault which on the one hand needn't have been fiction, but on the other hand I write ghost poems. Apropos of almost nothing in the story except vibes, I can't believe I've never read Bryher's Blitz novel.
spatch and I finally saw Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) at the Somerville Theatre, where it looked gorgeously shadowed and bleached on 35 mm and remains essentially stuck between the tight-wired claustrophobia of its radio original and the more expansively Gothic noir its rationale for murder has complicated into, although Barbara Stanwyck does her white-knuckled best to bridge them. Because it was produced by Hal Wallis for Paramount, I appreciate the fix of Wendell Corey my brain did not have to dream up for me. Poor Dr. Alexander, who thought he was only in a normally Freudian post-war marital psychodrama. In Hitchcock it would have killed him, but thanks to Lucille Fletcher he's just going to have a bad morning when he sees the news.I have not seen the two-strip Technicolor 1922 Anna May Wong film from which Sally Wen Mao's "The Toll of the Sea" (2015) takes its title and the palette of its argument, but I am very struck by the poem. Over the weekend I made an honest effort to watch Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and even for Wong and Sessue Hayakawa I wiped out on the high-test Orientalism of the plot. The internet informs me that unless you count the tragic ending, they don't even end up together. That cannot be more insulting than Warner Oland's Fu Manchu, but it feels like it.
I keep tapping at B. Pladek's "The Spindle of Necessity" (2024), partly because I am not the target audience while knowing all the references. As a short story, it reads like a direct interrogation of its author's relationship with the life and works of Mary Renault which on the one hand needn't have been fiction, but on the other hand I write ghost poems. Apropos of almost nothing in the story except vibes, I can't believe I've never read Bryher's Blitz novel.
