For various reasons, this weekend was not the exercise in recuperation I had hoped for. I am achingly tired and feeling weirdly severed from myself. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit set me five questions for a reciprocal film meme, however.
1. A book that you'd like adapted into a film.
If I could be assured of as matter-of-fact a treatment of fluid gender and queerness as the mid-century novel leaves more than textual room for among its classical allusions and supernatural nods, I would give a lot for a well-cast film of Josephine Tey's To Love and Be Wise (1950). It should preserve the post-war setting without preciousness and perhaps know a little more than its author about the quirks and eddies of attraction which attend its rope trick throughout the ensemble. Reading the novel for the first time fifteen years ago, I thought that another fifteen years back it would have been tailor-made for Tilda Swinton. These days I might vote Emma D'Arcy for the role of Leslie Searle, the innocently beautiful American photographer who dazzles and discomfits all Salcott St. Mary before disappearing with the elusiveness of a daemon lover and the entanglements of a crime. "I am quite sure that he was something very wicked in Ancient Greece."
2. A missing film/TV that you'd like to watch.
Lance Comfort's Squadron Leader X (1943), co-written by Emeric Pressburger and starring Eric Portman. The BFI wants it and so do I. John le Carré alluded in his memoirs to having seen it as a child and I wanted to write to him about it. If I can't have it, I'll take the original cut of Anders als die Andern (1919), the complete Flaming Youth (1923), or just about any of the missing productions of Esther Eng. Out of the vast reams of lost television, for the moment I've chosen DuMont's The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951) with Anna May Wong and the 1955 BBC The Browning Version with Peter Cushing.
3. Do you have some recs for old films that I might like?
If you are not the person who originally recommended me Blanche Fury (1948), I can only commend it in your direction with all possible superlatives as an extravagantly Gothic showcase for one of the best performances I have seen out of Valerie Hobson that plays like the Technicolor missing link between Gainsborough and horror-era Hammer. It has a plot and it's a cruel, clever one wound round the historically inspired schemes of two poor relations of the same landed family, but it's one of the few films of its decade that can challenge Powell and Pressburger for telling its story through the vividness of its mise-en-scène as much as the action unspooling therein. Audrey Erskine Lindop had a hand in adapting the 1939 novel by Marjorie Bowen and I can't tell if she contributed to the dramatically artificial weirdness that soaks a surrealist portrait out of every other frame, but the supernatural punch which only comes really visible in the last few frames is breathtaking. I kept meaning to write about it at deserved length—if I ran a series of movies which could have been written by Tanith Lee, it would rate near the top—and foundering on liking it too much. Once again I conclude that Lean misdirected Hobson in Great Expectations (1946), because if she had played the adult Estella like Blanche Fury, John Mills would never have had a chance. Michael Gough and Stewart Granger certainly do not, but really, in this genre, neither does she.
In the same vein of films which you may have seen and simply not discussed with me, Laughing Anne (1953) has the budget of traveling mattes and its essential sentiment wrecks any literary cachet it attempts to claim with the frame device of narration by Joseph Conrad himself, but it stars Wendell Corey and Margaret Lockwood as a pair of vexed lovers rattling around the Java coast in the late nineteenth century, so naturally I would have watched it even if it were dreadful and instead at its best it's a rather lovely, bittersweet and adult romance with a garnish of sea-longing as well as the human kind and at its worst the dedication of the actors to the material keeps the tropically overheated melodrama from breaching total plausibility containment. It was made during the late slump of Lockwood's film career and did little to decelerate it, but she shines in the picture even through a Dietrich-y French accent. Oddly it may be the only time I have seen her in color, which seems unfair when her hair is dyed for an entire act. Since it is close to the only film in which I have seen Corey as a straightforward hero, I appreciate knowing he can be just as credible as when romantically losing out. A marmalade cat and Ronald Shiner feature in the supporting cast.
And just to notch a recommendation for Hollywood, Come Next Spring (1956) suffers from a slight case of third-act escalation which feels all the more redundant when so much of its emotional power has built up through the fragile commitment of quotidian routine, but it is otherwise a frank and fascinatingly vulnerable movie about the rewards and difficulties of rebuilding a relationship that was none too solid to begin with. There isn't much to the plot and what there is sounds saccharine: in rural Arkansas in 1927, nine years after her man came home from the war just in time to run out on his family, a flintily independent grass widow finds herself faced with the re-return of her wastrel husband, painfully sober and hoping to make amends. The sexual current between them snaps on like it's been no time at all. So does the starkness of the damage he dealt his wife and children as an absentee hell-raiser whose reputation clung even after the man himself had gone. None of it can be healed with grand gestures; all he can do is demonstrate that he can be trusted, chore by chore, day by day, working the farm, not touching liquor, not touching his wife unless she invites him, which she may never feel safe enough with this familiar stranger to do. Both Steve Cochran and Ann Sheridan are marvelous, playing sincere and direct against their slicker, snappier types, and the film's folksiness is never allowed to cloy into condescension. The period setting feels optional in light of the timeline which could have run just as easily from the end of WWII, but perhaps it serves the timelessness of the problem. "But I been lonely a terrible long time, Matt. And you only been good a couple of months."
4. A film it surprises people that you love?
Earlier this year I was told that I have dad taste in movies, which seemed in context to mean conservative and dude-centric, so I hope it would surprise at least that person that I love Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women (2016), a soft-spoken triptych of modern Western studies in the women men don't see, although sometimes other women do. Laura Dern, Jared Harris, Michelle Williams, and René Auberjonois all turn in quietly etched and frayed portraits in the first two panels, something melancholy and comic in even the most acrid sketches of patriarchy, but the third should have earned Lily Gladstone their first Oscar just for the way their winter rancher looks at the frazzled night school teacher played by Kristen Stewart in a near-silent suffusion of working-class queer love. When the rancher takes a horse instead of her truck into town in order to treat the woman she loves to a streetlit ride to the all-night diner and back, it's more than just a gesture of old-fashioned romance: it's an unparalleled courtship display of female masculinity, the rancher who has parted and combed her hair and buttoned her clean shirt as carefully as if she were paying a call on a lady friend a hundred years ago sitting her mount, calm, erect, easy on the reins, like a knight-errant, like one of her plains-ranging ancestors, like her pronouns are "cowboy." Her hair shines under its wool hat like the horse's newly curried coat. The clink of the tack and the clop of the hooves sound counterpoint to the lens flare of sodium light. The rancher smiles with the other woman's arms around her waist, pillion as a heroine in the dreamlike slow rock of the night. It's so brief, yet so richly and factually shot by Christopher Blauvelt in the 16 mm that gives the whole film a tint of home movies like memories that even as we sense the gulf between the wealth that the rancher offers with her shy and watchful pride and what the object of her infatuation can read in the quixotic change of pace, we can still feel the thrill as tangible as horsehair or dry high-country cold. My God, get you someone who looks at you like that scene. I got Sayers in Montana: But she now realised that there was, after all, something god-like about him. He could control a horse.
5. Which film were you most hoping could be an answer to one of these question? Because now it has to be!
Ask me anything about Singin' in the Rain (1952)!
thisbluespirit set me five questions for a reciprocal film meme, however.1. A book that you'd like adapted into a film.
If I could be assured of as matter-of-fact a treatment of fluid gender and queerness as the mid-century novel leaves more than textual room for among its classical allusions and supernatural nods, I would give a lot for a well-cast film of Josephine Tey's To Love and Be Wise (1950). It should preserve the post-war setting without preciousness and perhaps know a little more than its author about the quirks and eddies of attraction which attend its rope trick throughout the ensemble. Reading the novel for the first time fifteen years ago, I thought that another fifteen years back it would have been tailor-made for Tilda Swinton. These days I might vote Emma D'Arcy for the role of Leslie Searle, the innocently beautiful American photographer who dazzles and discomfits all Salcott St. Mary before disappearing with the elusiveness of a daemon lover and the entanglements of a crime. "I am quite sure that he was something very wicked in Ancient Greece."
2. A missing film/TV that you'd like to watch.
Lance Comfort's Squadron Leader X (1943), co-written by Emeric Pressburger and starring Eric Portman. The BFI wants it and so do I. John le Carré alluded in his memoirs to having seen it as a child and I wanted to write to him about it. If I can't have it, I'll take the original cut of Anders als die Andern (1919), the complete Flaming Youth (1923), or just about any of the missing productions of Esther Eng. Out of the vast reams of lost television, for the moment I've chosen DuMont's The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951) with Anna May Wong and the 1955 BBC The Browning Version with Peter Cushing.
3. Do you have some recs for old films that I might like?
If you are not the person who originally recommended me Blanche Fury (1948), I can only commend it in your direction with all possible superlatives as an extravagantly Gothic showcase for one of the best performances I have seen out of Valerie Hobson that plays like the Technicolor missing link between Gainsborough and horror-era Hammer. It has a plot and it's a cruel, clever one wound round the historically inspired schemes of two poor relations of the same landed family, but it's one of the few films of its decade that can challenge Powell and Pressburger for telling its story through the vividness of its mise-en-scène as much as the action unspooling therein. Audrey Erskine Lindop had a hand in adapting the 1939 novel by Marjorie Bowen and I can't tell if she contributed to the dramatically artificial weirdness that soaks a surrealist portrait out of every other frame, but the supernatural punch which only comes really visible in the last few frames is breathtaking. I kept meaning to write about it at deserved length—if I ran a series of movies which could have been written by Tanith Lee, it would rate near the top—and foundering on liking it too much. Once again I conclude that Lean misdirected Hobson in Great Expectations (1946), because if she had played the adult Estella like Blanche Fury, John Mills would never have had a chance. Michael Gough and Stewart Granger certainly do not, but really, in this genre, neither does she.
In the same vein of films which you may have seen and simply not discussed with me, Laughing Anne (1953) has the budget of traveling mattes and its essential sentiment wrecks any literary cachet it attempts to claim with the frame device of narration by Joseph Conrad himself, but it stars Wendell Corey and Margaret Lockwood as a pair of vexed lovers rattling around the Java coast in the late nineteenth century, so naturally I would have watched it even if it were dreadful and instead at its best it's a rather lovely, bittersweet and adult romance with a garnish of sea-longing as well as the human kind and at its worst the dedication of the actors to the material keeps the tropically overheated melodrama from breaching total plausibility containment. It was made during the late slump of Lockwood's film career and did little to decelerate it, but she shines in the picture even through a Dietrich-y French accent. Oddly it may be the only time I have seen her in color, which seems unfair when her hair is dyed for an entire act. Since it is close to the only film in which I have seen Corey as a straightforward hero, I appreciate knowing he can be just as credible as when romantically losing out. A marmalade cat and Ronald Shiner feature in the supporting cast.
And just to notch a recommendation for Hollywood, Come Next Spring (1956) suffers from a slight case of third-act escalation which feels all the more redundant when so much of its emotional power has built up through the fragile commitment of quotidian routine, but it is otherwise a frank and fascinatingly vulnerable movie about the rewards and difficulties of rebuilding a relationship that was none too solid to begin with. There isn't much to the plot and what there is sounds saccharine: in rural Arkansas in 1927, nine years after her man came home from the war just in time to run out on his family, a flintily independent grass widow finds herself faced with the re-return of her wastrel husband, painfully sober and hoping to make amends. The sexual current between them snaps on like it's been no time at all. So does the starkness of the damage he dealt his wife and children as an absentee hell-raiser whose reputation clung even after the man himself had gone. None of it can be healed with grand gestures; all he can do is demonstrate that he can be trusted, chore by chore, day by day, working the farm, not touching liquor, not touching his wife unless she invites him, which she may never feel safe enough with this familiar stranger to do. Both Steve Cochran and Ann Sheridan are marvelous, playing sincere and direct against their slicker, snappier types, and the film's folksiness is never allowed to cloy into condescension. The period setting feels optional in light of the timeline which could have run just as easily from the end of WWII, but perhaps it serves the timelessness of the problem. "But I been lonely a terrible long time, Matt. And you only been good a couple of months."
4. A film it surprises people that you love?
Earlier this year I was told that I have dad taste in movies, which seemed in context to mean conservative and dude-centric, so I hope it would surprise at least that person that I love Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women (2016), a soft-spoken triptych of modern Western studies in the women men don't see, although sometimes other women do. Laura Dern, Jared Harris, Michelle Williams, and René Auberjonois all turn in quietly etched and frayed portraits in the first two panels, something melancholy and comic in even the most acrid sketches of patriarchy, but the third should have earned Lily Gladstone their first Oscar just for the way their winter rancher looks at the frazzled night school teacher played by Kristen Stewart in a near-silent suffusion of working-class queer love. When the rancher takes a horse instead of her truck into town in order to treat the woman she loves to a streetlit ride to the all-night diner and back, it's more than just a gesture of old-fashioned romance: it's an unparalleled courtship display of female masculinity, the rancher who has parted and combed her hair and buttoned her clean shirt as carefully as if she were paying a call on a lady friend a hundred years ago sitting her mount, calm, erect, easy on the reins, like a knight-errant, like one of her plains-ranging ancestors, like her pronouns are "cowboy." Her hair shines under its wool hat like the horse's newly curried coat. The clink of the tack and the clop of the hooves sound counterpoint to the lens flare of sodium light. The rancher smiles with the other woman's arms around her waist, pillion as a heroine in the dreamlike slow rock of the night. It's so brief, yet so richly and factually shot by Christopher Blauvelt in the 16 mm that gives the whole film a tint of home movies like memories that even as we sense the gulf between the wealth that the rancher offers with her shy and watchful pride and what the object of her infatuation can read in the quixotic change of pace, we can still feel the thrill as tangible as horsehair or dry high-country cold. My God, get you someone who looks at you like that scene. I got Sayers in Montana: But she now realised that there was, after all, something god-like about him. He could control a horse.
5. Which film were you most hoping could be an answer to one of these question? Because now it has to be!
Ask me anything about Singin' in the Rain (1952)!
