A long march, a long march, and twenty years behind

[sovay]

Look, I don't know Neil Marshall from a poke in the eye with a pilum, but all things being equal, I'd rather see The Eagle of the Ninth. No offense, but General Virilus? Does he have a very great friend in Rome named Biggus Dickus?

(Oh, movies. How is it you can beautifully realize Middle-Earth and still fuck up the Romans on a regular basis?)

Comments

[sovay]

I was also going to quote more Sutcliff Roman legionary lyrics at you, but forgot about them in my fervor over the subject of Cullen ... the one you used as a title always runs to a tune vaguely like "McNamara's Band" when I hear it in my head.

Cool. (Even if you will have to point me toward a recording of "McNamara's Band," because I don't actually know it.) I was just lamenting to nineweaving that Peter Bellamy never set "Rimini," which is the song that "The Girl I Kissed at Clusium" always mixes itself up in my head with—he could have set Sutcliff's lyrics, too, while he was at it! This film had better include a legionary song, is all I'm saying.

[chomiji]

"McNamara's Band"is an old Irish chestnut - here's a video of a performance - from an old movie, I guess. It's the chorus that I'm mainly matching up in each case. The phrase "The girl I kissed at Clusium comes easy to my mind" maps onto the phrase "A credit to old Ireland is McNamara's Band." The fit on the verses is not quite as good, but it can be worked. The performance there has it a little too fast for a good march, but I have heard it played as a marching band number.

[sovay]

The phrase "The girl I kissed at Clusium comes easy to my mind" maps onto the phrase "A credit to old Ireland is McNamara's Band." The fit on the verses is not quite as good, but it can be worked.

Thanks!

I just found out tonight there was a radio adaptation of The Eagle of the Ninth in 1957. I would really like to hear it, both because I remember Marius Goring fondly from Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948), and because its setting of "The Girl I Kissed at Clusium" seems to have been the kind that listeners still remember fifty years later. To my great dismay, however, it looks as though it just spilled out over the wires and disappeared: "Neither the serial, or the edited play version are held by the BBC Sound Archive and there is no information about it being issued by Transcription Services." I'm hoping if I search the internet earnestly enough, I'll discover someone made a private recording. Either that, or Mithras will manifest and whap the BBC Sound Archive over the head.