In two days I travel to see ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie and family, which I am really looking forward to, and will be doing so by plane, which I haven't done in a dozen years, and I am in a terrible mood because after a run of aggravatingly disrupted days I was finally in too much pain to sleep at all last night or see the movie in theaters I had planned tonight, so have some things like links.
1. Apparently the claim that SS Warrimoo existed simultaneously in two different days, months, years, decades, centuries, and hemispheres is unverifiable, but since it would have been both the funniest and the uncanniest thing the captain could have done with proximity to the International Date Line on New Year's Eve 1899, I shall hope it actually happened. I can only imagine how displeased the Elements on assignment were.
2. In the absence of a playscript, I persist in my quest to figure out what gives with The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950). I have been able to find little information on the production itself beyond a tantalizing claim in Film Industry in December 1948 that "John Argyle's first production for 1949 is to be a screen adaptation of Leo Mark's [sic] successful West End play, The Girl Who Couldn't Quite. The script is being written by the director, Norman Lee, in collaboration with Roma June, Leo Marks, and Lewis Cranston," which is definitely not the disposition of writing credits in the finished film, but I was able to cheat Google Books out of the summary of the stage play provided in Samuel French Ltd.'s The Guide to Selecting Plays (1966):
( Did the world screw you up, too? )
Which actually didn't give me much more information than I had in the first place from Leo Marks beyond confirming the general opening-out of the play for film and specifically did not help me assign an authorship to the issues of tone and pacing and random jags of subplot, so I fell down a fragmentary rabbit hole of available contemporary reviews. The best in terms of information as well as appreciation looks like Harold Hobson, who saw the play in the second week of its run at the St. Martin's Theatre in August 1947 and leaves the impression that it shared its faults and virtues more or less directly with the film:
( I'm not taking anything from you, just giving you my hands. )
Which is not what I expected to find. I am left with the confused best guess that the stage and film versions may have differed in their random jags of subplot and issues of pacing and tone—if Hobson complains about the play leaping straight into the main action, it can't have suffered from the film's meandering first act—but worked out to the same effect, the muddle of a comedy of manners around the weird, real heart of the fairy tale. Or the screenplay is just that much closer to the playscript than the credits gave out. In any case, this review also looks like the one Marks was thinking of in his footnote: "One benevolent reviewer . . . likened its climax to The Turn of the Screw. The others screwed it altogether, though a few were kind enough to suggest that the author try again." I found some of those, too.
3. From talking withrinue about Benjamin Britten, I just found out that Montagu Slater, whom I know almost strictly as the librettist for Peter Grimes (1945), wrote a 1944 novel about speedway racing called Once a Jolly Swagman, later adapted into a 1949 film of the same name which I can't believe I missed in the summer of 2020 because it has (a) motorcycles (b) Dirk Bogarde, so spatch and I are going to watch it for my erev birthday, i.e. immediately.
selkie and family, which I am really looking forward to, and will be doing so by plane, which I haven't done in a dozen years, and I am in a terrible mood because after a run of aggravatingly disrupted days I was finally in too much pain to sleep at all last night or see the movie in theaters I had planned tonight, so have some things like links.1. Apparently the claim that SS Warrimoo existed simultaneously in two different days, months, years, decades, centuries, and hemispheres is unverifiable, but since it would have been both the funniest and the uncanniest thing the captain could have done with proximity to the International Date Line on New Year's Eve 1899, I shall hope it actually happened. I can only imagine how displeased the Elements on assignment were.
2. In the absence of a playscript, I persist in my quest to figure out what gives with The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950). I have been able to find little information on the production itself beyond a tantalizing claim in Film Industry in December 1948 that "John Argyle's first production for 1949 is to be a screen adaptation of Leo Mark's [sic] successful West End play, The Girl Who Couldn't Quite. The script is being written by the director, Norman Lee, in collaboration with Roma June, Leo Marks, and Lewis Cranston," which is definitely not the disposition of writing credits in the finished film, but I was able to cheat Google Books out of the summary of the stage play provided in Samuel French Ltd.'s The Guide to Selecting Plays (1966):
( Did the world screw you up, too? )
Which actually didn't give me much more information than I had in the first place from Leo Marks beyond confirming the general opening-out of the play for film and specifically did not help me assign an authorship to the issues of tone and pacing and random jags of subplot, so I fell down a fragmentary rabbit hole of available contemporary reviews. The best in terms of information as well as appreciation looks like Harold Hobson, who saw the play in the second week of its run at the St. Martin's Theatre in August 1947 and leaves the impression that it shared its faults and virtues more or less directly with the film:
( I'm not taking anything from you, just giving you my hands. )
Which is not what I expected to find. I am left with the confused best guess that the stage and film versions may have differed in their random jags of subplot and issues of pacing and tone—if Hobson complains about the play leaping straight into the main action, it can't have suffered from the film's meandering first act—but worked out to the same effect, the muddle of a comedy of manners around the weird, real heart of the fairy tale. Or the screenplay is just that much closer to the playscript than the credits gave out. In any case, this review also looks like the one Marks was thinking of in his footnote: "One benevolent reviewer . . . likened its climax to The Turn of the Screw. The others screwed it altogether, though a few were kind enough to suggest that the author try again." I found some of those, too.
3. From talking with
rinue about Benjamin Britten, I just found out that Montagu Slater, whom I know almost strictly as the librettist for Peter Grimes (1945), wrote a 1944 novel about speedway racing called Once a Jolly Swagman, later adapted into a 1949 film of the same name which I can't believe I missed in the summer of 2020 because it has (a) motorcycles (b) Dirk Bogarde, so spatch and I are going to watch it for my erev birthday, i.e. immediately.
