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I only said I'd burn his house down and cut his liver out
I don't know why I dreamed last night that my brother had joined the army and a commercial jet crashed into a nonexistent apartment complex on the other side of the Arlington Reservoir, but somehow I find it difficult to believe the thought of getting up at six in the morning to wait in line for a turkey at Debra's Natural Gourmet was an appropriate provocation. I was very tired, but not particularly terrified. But now we have a turkey, around which I will be making things like pumpkin tagine and clementine-jícama salad and mushroom-spinach panade, because I like that sort of thing—if all goes well, desserts will include pumpkin-ginger rice pudding and a fruit gratin with Calvados and mascarpone. I'm just hoping my back won't interfere. I hurt it this weekend helping my brother repaint the steps and the front walk and it hasn't fixed itself yet. So far I've gotten through several important preparatory steps for tomorrow's cooking without immobilizing myself, but interacting with the oven is not going to be fun this year.
Earlier today my mother asked me why she recognizes Michael Gough's name. I told her The Small Back Room (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), Horror of Dracula (1958), Alice in Wonderland (1966) . . . Apparently it's his birthday; he's ninety-three. I am taking this as an excuse to post about The Horse's Mouth (1958), since he's in the supporting cast and it's a film I've meant to write up for some time. I watched it last Wednesday with Viking Zen. It's about art.
I'll tell you a secret. Jimson never was an artist. You know what the critics said about him in the 1920's? They said he was a nasty young man who tried to advertise himself by painting and drawing like a child of six. And since then he's got worse.
All right, a lot of movies are about art. But this one is about art without being either condescending or breathlessly glorifying, which is a great rarity; and it is about a brilliant, difficult artist and the above conditions still apply, which is even rarer. You can imagine the angsty romantic or the sweetly crackpot dreamer that might have resulted from a softer script or a director less willing to simply let his characters happen to the screen.1 Instead we get Gulley Jimson, who may be the most impressive performance I've seen from Alec Guinness. His obsessive disregard for everything but the realization of his vision is the bedrock of his life, but he's as far from the radioactively innocent Sidney Stratton as the kitchen sink is from Ealing Studios. With his fraying hair and three-day stubble and clothes that are hopelessly paint-stained at their best and at worst (no, really) wads of newspaper, Gulley looks like someone who last washed when he got caught in a cloudburst, a frowsty, scruffy, scrounging chancer who can summon a disreputable knowing charm when he has time for it, but more often gets by on a sort of low-rent social blackmail: he'll go away if you give him a couple of bob. We meet him at the end of a month in Wormwood Scrubs, where he landed for making obscene threats by telephone to his patron Hickson (the exquisitely long-suffering Ernest Thesiger). Five minutes on the outside, he's rung up the old man again in a variety of funny voices, stolen a bicycle from the starstruck kid (Mike Morgan) who hopes to become his apprentice, and is trying to wheedle whatever he can get out of his on-again-sod-off-again girlfriend (Kay Walsh, magnificent), a barmaid named Cokie with a heart of cast-iron. He has a lung-heaving smoker's cough, a voice like the forty miles of bad road Tom Waits used to drive on. He quotes from Blake and Chesterton and nearly his first words to the sweet, self-appointed disciple he's nicknamed Nosey are, "Go away! Scram! Tie lead weights to your feet, fireworks in your hair—kiss your mother goodbye and jump in the river. I don't know you, I don't want to know you. Buzz off! Explode!" Then he walks off with his spare change. At night, on his dilapidated houseboat, he patches the canvas of Adam and Eve that some local children shot up with air-guns while he was in prison. He got the money for the paints from Cokie. Nosey is wide-eyed and grateful to keep house for a genius and Gulley doesn't stop him. Don't even ask about the shemozzle with the eighteen paintings that belonged to his ex-wife.2 Like a Platonic type of the artist, Gulley truly cares for nothing except his art. Anyone and anything else, he'll use in its service. And while this makes him a figure of noble aspiration, it also makes him something of a massive jerk.3
Your Ladyship, I saw you in the nude, squatting down by that wall, laughing merrily. But now I see you clothed, rather foolishly, clasping a cornucopia from which you're distributing useless gifts to the poor.
And yet, there's just enough not total bastardry in him that we understand why, for example, a woman as immune to romanticism as Cokie puts up with him. He does have a vision. Sometimes he succeeds in communicating it. Even his failures, like the monumental Raising of Lazarus that gets derailed by a foot fetish, are impressive in their expressionist solidity, announced as immediately by their smash-in-the-face colors as by their thickly sculpted impasto as the work of Gulley Jimson and no one else.4 It can't be nicely handwaved as the vagaries of Art, but it's not incomprehensible that he should beg, borrow, and steal in order to get the space and the resources to keep trying—in his place, any creative-minded audience probably likes to think they'd do the same. But we are never quite sure, watching this film, whether Gulley is going to succeed in translating what he describes as "a kind of colored music in the mind" to a medium where it can be heard and felt by others, or whether he'll self-destruct in the process, or both at once or neither or what on earth, because while The Horse's Mouth is a comedy, riotously funny in ways that are at once hyperreal and not at all sentimental, Gulley Jimson is such a three-dimensional, messily real character that all bets are off. In short, I cannot understand how this screenplay lost to Gigi, or why neither Alec Guinness nor Kay Walsh were nominated in the first place, except by means of the traditional conclusion that the Academy Awards are run by idiots and thank God for the Criterion Collection. It's perfectly in character for Gulley, who remains a careless outsider even when a screwloose of fate elevates his paintings to the National Gallery, but there is such a thing as taking metafiction too far.
1. Alec Guinness wrote the screenplay himself and the other two films I've seen by Ronald Neame are Tunes of Glory (1960) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), neither of which offers a pigeonhole protagonist. I haven't seen the latter since high school, but I kept meaning to write about Tunes of Glory after I saw it last fall; suffice to say that it's a study of two clashing models of masculinity that implode with distressingly similar ease and it's one of the movies that got me to notice John Mills. The other was Hobson's Choice (1954), which I haven't gotten around to writing up, either.
2. I cannot remember many roles in which Alec Guinness has a sexual presence (Tunes of Glory is another exception). Here we get a priceless scene at the apartment of Sir William and Lady Flora Beeder—their names are nearly their characterization—where a rather boozed-up Gulley, asked for an honest opinion on the lady's watercolor landscapes, finds himself unable to choose between flattering her patronage, demolishing her banality, and aggressively coming on to her person, so he tries all three at once and in short order ("I have news for you. I'm going to be a little bit ill") passes out. Set against that is the moment where he's shy of stripping in front of Cokie: it's not like they haven't slept together, but that's his mix of brazen confidence tricks and introversion for you. As an artist, he's monstrously egotistic. Perhaps not so much when there's no painting at stake.
3. Of course, if he weren't, we wouldn't have any depth to the film, let alone the gloriously shambolic middle sequence in which Gulley finagles his way into six weeks alone in a very expensive apartment—it has a wall he wants—only to be gate-crashed by an equally opportunistic sculptor (Michael Gough).3a All of a sudden the soberly draped furniture is covered in models and paint drips, the antiques are being pawned to cover the cost of gin, and a fine cloud of stone dust and cigarette smoke hangs everywhere as bohemia crashes devil-may-care into the unsuspecting upper class. Here, as in the film's final arc where Gulley organizes the painting of his Creation in the nave of a condemned church, I kept finding it hard to believe the film was made in 1958. It feels ten to fifteen years later. Art students go around in jeans and sweaters with rolled-up sleeves, long-haired and anarchic. There are brick-throwing clashes with authority. There's brightly colored counterculture. And the original novel was 1944. Everything started sooner than I think.
3a. The first time I saw The Horse's Mouth, it took me a few scenes to recognize him in color. I thought at first he was Robert Stephens. In a less generous script, Abel Bisson would be a complete fraud, the hack Gulley accuses him of being, by way of contrast with the painter. (In the original novel, he may have been.) Instead, though he may show even fewer scruples, he's as intent and frustrated as Gulley himself, lit up and swaggering with talk of British Railways—"It's a commission, Jimson! Real money! Big stuff!"—then dispirited at what's left of a ton of marble after inspiration's been at it for a month. "Doesn't it say to you 'Mother Earth surrounded by her dead'?" he asks unconvincedly, pushing one hand through his dust-greyed hair. With much the same expression, Jimson stares at his wall.
4. The paintings were done for the film by John Bratby, although I was reminded first of Francis Bacon: "It is not to do with mortality like lots of people think, but it's to do with the colour of meat." Remember that term, kitchen sink? It originated to describe Bratby. He has a painting in the Tate called "Still Life with Chip Frier."
To bed. It annoys me that I've been awake for eighteen hours on two hours of sleep and I'm still unlikely to fall asleep before dawn. I will read Leigh Brackett and see what happens.
Earlier today my mother asked me why she recognizes Michael Gough's name. I told her The Small Back Room (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), Horror of Dracula (1958), Alice in Wonderland (1966) . . . Apparently it's his birthday; he's ninety-three. I am taking this as an excuse to post about The Horse's Mouth (1958), since he's in the supporting cast and it's a film I've meant to write up for some time. I watched it last Wednesday with Viking Zen. It's about art.
I'll tell you a secret. Jimson never was an artist. You know what the critics said about him in the 1920's? They said he was a nasty young man who tried to advertise himself by painting and drawing like a child of six. And since then he's got worse.
All right, a lot of movies are about art. But this one is about art without being either condescending or breathlessly glorifying, which is a great rarity; and it is about a brilliant, difficult artist and the above conditions still apply, which is even rarer. You can imagine the angsty romantic or the sweetly crackpot dreamer that might have resulted from a softer script or a director less willing to simply let his characters happen to the screen.1 Instead we get Gulley Jimson, who may be the most impressive performance I've seen from Alec Guinness. His obsessive disregard for everything but the realization of his vision is the bedrock of his life, but he's as far from the radioactively innocent Sidney Stratton as the kitchen sink is from Ealing Studios. With his fraying hair and three-day stubble and clothes that are hopelessly paint-stained at their best and at worst (no, really) wads of newspaper, Gulley looks like someone who last washed when he got caught in a cloudburst, a frowsty, scruffy, scrounging chancer who can summon a disreputable knowing charm when he has time for it, but more often gets by on a sort of low-rent social blackmail: he'll go away if you give him a couple of bob. We meet him at the end of a month in Wormwood Scrubs, where he landed for making obscene threats by telephone to his patron Hickson (the exquisitely long-suffering Ernest Thesiger). Five minutes on the outside, he's rung up the old man again in a variety of funny voices, stolen a bicycle from the starstruck kid (Mike Morgan) who hopes to become his apprentice, and is trying to wheedle whatever he can get out of his on-again-sod-off-again girlfriend (Kay Walsh, magnificent), a barmaid named Cokie with a heart of cast-iron. He has a lung-heaving smoker's cough, a voice like the forty miles of bad road Tom Waits used to drive on. He quotes from Blake and Chesterton and nearly his first words to the sweet, self-appointed disciple he's nicknamed Nosey are, "Go away! Scram! Tie lead weights to your feet, fireworks in your hair—kiss your mother goodbye and jump in the river. I don't know you, I don't want to know you. Buzz off! Explode!" Then he walks off with his spare change. At night, on his dilapidated houseboat, he patches the canvas of Adam and Eve that some local children shot up with air-guns while he was in prison. He got the money for the paints from Cokie. Nosey is wide-eyed and grateful to keep house for a genius and Gulley doesn't stop him. Don't even ask about the shemozzle with the eighteen paintings that belonged to his ex-wife.2 Like a Platonic type of the artist, Gulley truly cares for nothing except his art. Anyone and anything else, he'll use in its service. And while this makes him a figure of noble aspiration, it also makes him something of a massive jerk.3
Your Ladyship, I saw you in the nude, squatting down by that wall, laughing merrily. But now I see you clothed, rather foolishly, clasping a cornucopia from which you're distributing useless gifts to the poor.
And yet, there's just enough not total bastardry in him that we understand why, for example, a woman as immune to romanticism as Cokie puts up with him. He does have a vision. Sometimes he succeeds in communicating it. Even his failures, like the monumental Raising of Lazarus that gets derailed by a foot fetish, are impressive in their expressionist solidity, announced as immediately by their smash-in-the-face colors as by their thickly sculpted impasto as the work of Gulley Jimson and no one else.4 It can't be nicely handwaved as the vagaries of Art, but it's not incomprehensible that he should beg, borrow, and steal in order to get the space and the resources to keep trying—in his place, any creative-minded audience probably likes to think they'd do the same. But we are never quite sure, watching this film, whether Gulley is going to succeed in translating what he describes as "a kind of colored music in the mind" to a medium where it can be heard and felt by others, or whether he'll self-destruct in the process, or both at once or neither or what on earth, because while The Horse's Mouth is a comedy, riotously funny in ways that are at once hyperreal and not at all sentimental, Gulley Jimson is such a three-dimensional, messily real character that all bets are off. In short, I cannot understand how this screenplay lost to Gigi, or why neither Alec Guinness nor Kay Walsh were nominated in the first place, except by means of the traditional conclusion that the Academy Awards are run by idiots and thank God for the Criterion Collection. It's perfectly in character for Gulley, who remains a careless outsider even when a screwloose of fate elevates his paintings to the National Gallery, but there is such a thing as taking metafiction too far.
1. Alec Guinness wrote the screenplay himself and the other two films I've seen by Ronald Neame are Tunes of Glory (1960) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), neither of which offers a pigeonhole protagonist. I haven't seen the latter since high school, but I kept meaning to write about Tunes of Glory after I saw it last fall; suffice to say that it's a study of two clashing models of masculinity that implode with distressingly similar ease and it's one of the movies that got me to notice John Mills. The other was Hobson's Choice (1954), which I haven't gotten around to writing up, either.
2. I cannot remember many roles in which Alec Guinness has a sexual presence (Tunes of Glory is another exception). Here we get a priceless scene at the apartment of Sir William and Lady Flora Beeder—their names are nearly their characterization—where a rather boozed-up Gulley, asked for an honest opinion on the lady's watercolor landscapes, finds himself unable to choose between flattering her patronage, demolishing her banality, and aggressively coming on to her person, so he tries all three at once and in short order ("I have news for you. I'm going to be a little bit ill") passes out. Set against that is the moment where he's shy of stripping in front of Cokie: it's not like they haven't slept together, but that's his mix of brazen confidence tricks and introversion for you. As an artist, he's monstrously egotistic. Perhaps not so much when there's no painting at stake.
3. Of course, if he weren't, we wouldn't have any depth to the film, let alone the gloriously shambolic middle sequence in which Gulley finagles his way into six weeks alone in a very expensive apartment—it has a wall he wants—only to be gate-crashed by an equally opportunistic sculptor (Michael Gough).3a All of a sudden the soberly draped furniture is covered in models and paint drips, the antiques are being pawned to cover the cost of gin, and a fine cloud of stone dust and cigarette smoke hangs everywhere as bohemia crashes devil-may-care into the unsuspecting upper class. Here, as in the film's final arc where Gulley organizes the painting of his Creation in the nave of a condemned church, I kept finding it hard to believe the film was made in 1958. It feels ten to fifteen years later. Art students go around in jeans and sweaters with rolled-up sleeves, long-haired and anarchic. There are brick-throwing clashes with authority. There's brightly colored counterculture. And the original novel was 1944. Everything started sooner than I think.
3a. The first time I saw The Horse's Mouth, it took me a few scenes to recognize him in color. I thought at first he was Robert Stephens. In a less generous script, Abel Bisson would be a complete fraud, the hack Gulley accuses him of being, by way of contrast with the painter. (In the original novel, he may have been.) Instead, though he may show even fewer scruples, he's as intent and frustrated as Gulley himself, lit up and swaggering with talk of British Railways—"It's a commission, Jimson! Real money! Big stuff!"—then dispirited at what's left of a ton of marble after inspiration's been at it for a month. "Doesn't it say to you 'Mother Earth surrounded by her dead'?" he asks unconvincedly, pushing one hand through his dust-greyed hair. With much the same expression, Jimson stares at his wall.
4. The paintings were done for the film by John Bratby, although I was reminded first of Francis Bacon: "It is not to do with mortality like lots of people think, but it's to do with the colour of meat." Remember that term, kitchen sink? It originated to describe Bratby. He has a painting in the Tate called "Still Life with Chip Frier."
To bed. It annoys me that I've been awake for eighteen hours on two hours of sleep and I'm still unlikely to fall asleep before dawn. I will read Leigh Brackett and see what happens.
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Thank you. Although it's not really a road I want to drag anyone else down.
I think first saw it credited as a Spanish proverb on a greeting card
But yeah, I'd be happier, though, if you can sleep. I may not be much longer for consciousness.
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I remember when Bratby was the greatest living British painter. He's largely forgotten now, which is sad. His work has real presence. I remember him getting into trouble for painting himself as the crucified Christ.
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I do recommend it.
I remember when Bratby was the greatest living British painter. He's largely forgotten now, which is sad. His work has real presence.
I should find out more about him. Once I looked up his work, I was even more impressed than when I was just admiring the monumental murals onscreen; he's sufficiently avant-garde that he could have simply painted as himself for Gulley Jimson, but instead he developed an entirely distinct style for the film. You can tell it was done by the same person, but it's not the same artist's eye. That's awesome.
I remember him getting into trouble for painting himself as the crucified Christ.
Definitely need to see that.
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He's excellent, as are even the small roles in those series. I haven't seen Smiley's People in a couple of years, but I own and not infrequently rewatch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I can't believe they're remaking it as a movie; I can think of more unnecessary remakes, like The Wizard of Oz, but in sheer terms of why?, this one is high on the list.
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Then again, le Carré co-wrote the screenplay and I can stand seeing Oldman, Fiennes, Firth and Hardy in one film. Let me go stock up on fans.
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They're all very talented! John le Carré has the right to script any of his books he feels like! It's just one of the cases where I can't identify flaws with the original, so I don't see why there needs to be a remake at all.
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However, I think we should see this as a rite of passage for very good actors who want to make the transition to middle age and beyond. Also, look at it from the viewpoint of related art forms: theater, or ballet. There have been interpretations that are deemed definitive. Does it mean that a particular ballet or play can never be performed again with a new cast?
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Theater and ballet are designed for reperformance. By definition of recording, film and television are not.
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Nah. I have no interest in absolute rules of art. But there are so many remakes already: it seems to have become Hollywood's dominant art form. Why doesn't anyone want to make a proper film of Call for the Dead?
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Agreed. But in the case of good adaptations, I don't see the pressing need.
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You're welcome. Enjoy!
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Also, this movie introduced me to Lieutenant Kije.
---L.
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Yes. And as with A Canterbury Tale, it's one of those endings I think a lesser film might not have been able to pull off, but for this one it's precisely right.
Also, this movie introduced me to Lieutenant Kije.
You know, somehow I never quite made the connection: I knew the music was Prokofiev, but I never paid attention to what. That's perfect.
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I slept more than yesterday. I shall try to take pictures as I cook!
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The menu sounds fascinating. Enjoy! Pumpkin tagine isn't something I've heard of before--might I ask where you got the recipe?
I hope your back is feeling better.
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The Boston Globe.
I hope your back is feeling better.
It's not, but I've successfully made the panade and the rice pudding and am working on the tagine without further damage, so I'll take what I can get.
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Interesting. I'll have to google for it. I keep meaning to try making a tagine.
It's not, but I've successfully made the panade and the rice pudding and am working on the tagine without further damage, so I'll take what I can get.
I'm glad for the successes, and hope for improvements.
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There was a Criterion-on-the-cheap sale; I pounced.