Then all I know is I wake up covered in rubble

[sovay]

Green for Danger (1946) is a very strange little movie. It's a mystery with not a spare ounce on it that still finds time for free-floating Shakespeare and some beautifully expressionist camerawork, the kind Jacques Tourneur or Michael Powell would not have sneered at; it is not parodic, because it is a perfectly constructed drawing-room detective story (that happens to be taking place in 1944, in a wartime hospital that used to be a manor house), and yet it leaves you not with the satisfied sense that all loose ends have been turned out and tied up, but the double-taken one that something rather screwy has just happened. I attribute this partly to Launder and Gilliat and partly to Alastair Sim, whose Inspector Cockrill is an antic disposition in a fedora, at once eerily incisive and an utter fool: we have heard his voice all through the narrative, the rueful hindsight of a film noir, but our visual introduction is a few seconds of a dapper, darkly suited figure sauntering down a country lane, briefcase in hand and umbrella en pointe, who comes into range only to skitter into an undignified tumble over a fence as he mistakes a passing motorist for a V-1. (He will claim later that "such trifles did not, of course, for a moment distract me from my purpose," but he ducks into culverts and behind furniture at the slightest sound of an engine, overhead or not.) And then he dusts himself off, charily, critically, and hops back over the gate with a dancer's trim-ankled flourish, a bit of music-hall; slings umbrella and briefcase over his shoulder and goes on strolling like Autolycus until he arrives at the offices of Heron's Park. He is playing, unsettling the five suspects with a genial discourtesy that manifests in everything from impertinent non sequiturs to poker-faced quotation from The Merchant of Venice (". . . and ne'er a true one"), and just when it seems that he understands the figure he cuts and uses it—à la Columbo, to disarm—he turns to the last page of a detective novel in pleasurable anticipation of the solution and, crestfallen, must admit he's guessed wrong. Despite his stage-manager's relish, he is not infallible, and disquietingly so. One of the three deaths in the story is on his hands.

I'm not really sure what to compare it to—Bride of Frankenstein (1935) occurred to me, for the way Green for Danger breaks no rules of its genre while making a pretzel of its conventions (and Alastair Sim could give Ernest Thesiger a run for his money in the eccentricity sweeps), but that's a late-night shower analogue, not an assertion of genetics. It's less like The Lady Vanishes (1938) than I would have expected, too; less reassuring in its comedy, both personally and nationally; at one moment whimsically down-to-earth and the next so stylized, it's close to horror. But it was more than worth picking up from the Arlington Library and it finally provided me with Alastair Sim in a role outside of A Christmas Carol (1951). Also Trevor Howard, Leo Genn, Sally Gray; other actors I did not know. I do, however, know a lot more about operating room protocol in the 1940's than I did when I woke up yesterday.

Off to the doctor's. This was perhaps not the best timing in the world.

Comments

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

You should read Lew Grossman's The Magicians. It's like he stole an early manuscript of yours.

[sovay]

It's like he stole an early manuscript of yours.

So noted.

. . . Is that a good thing?

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. And I hope you're doing okay.

[sovay]

And I hope you're doing okay.

Routine appointment. I'm just remarking on the juxtaposition between watching a (fictional) murder in a hospital and then going off to a clinic . . .

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Routine appointment.

Ah, that's good. Sorry for my tendency to worry.

I'm just remarking on the juxtaposition between watching a (fictional) murder in a hospital and then going off to a clinic . . .

Yes.

Actually, this makes me think of something I've never thought about before--I wonder if it was a strange experience for my old writing teacher, Professor Kluge, when he was writing a novel about a series of murders at a college nearly identical to our mutual alma mater and his place of residence.

love

[4nt1g0n3.livejournal.com]

Hope all goes well at the doc's. I wanted to call you this morning but instead had a really long and stupid argument with my ex which killed the phone battery. More reasons to ignore his calls. Anyway, I do hope they tell you something helpful this time around!

love,
me

[sovay]

Hope all goes well at the doc's.

Thank you. I will keep you posted.

I wanted to call you this morning but instead had a really long and stupid argument with my ex which killed the phone battery.

Gyah. Fortunately, I will still be here when your phone recovers . . .

love,
me

Love you.