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The bulging eyes of puppets strangled by their strings
So there is a film of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop (1967), with screenplay by the author. It was directed by David Wheatley, starred no one I've ever heard of (the exception being its Uncle Philip, Tom Bell; Greenaway's Antonio in Prospero's Books), and judging by the number of wistful comments on IMDb, it doesn't seem to exist even on VHS unless you taped it off the television yourself in 1987. This saddens me: The Magic Toyshop wasn't the first novel I read by Carter, but it stands a good chance of still being my favorite.1 And my curiosity about its movie has been in no way diminished by the scathing contemporary review from the Washington Post I ran across last night:
In its most successful moments, the film hovers somewhere between the dank perversities of Michael Powell and those Hammer horror films in which Peter Cushing shows up as the proprietor of some haunted antique shop.
Seriously, dude: you misunderstand your comparisons. I want to see that.
1. The challenger would be Wise Children (1991), which was the first and about which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks recently discovered something neat. I am also very fond of Shadow Dance (1966), which I have under its U.S. title of Honeybuzzard with a very mod cover.
In its most successful moments, the film hovers somewhere between the dank perversities of Michael Powell and those Hammer horror films in which Peter Cushing shows up as the proprietor of some haunted antique shop.
Seriously, dude: you misunderstand your comparisons. I want to see that.
1. The challenger would be Wise Children (1991), which was the first and about which
rushthatspeaks recently discovered something neat. I am also very fond of Shadow Dance (1966), which I have under its U.S. title of Honeybuzzard with a very mod cover.
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What did you think of Nights at the Circus?
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Join the everlasting queue!
What did you think of Nights at the Circus?
I like it very much—it's a kind of second-tier favorite with Heroes and Villains or The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, depending on whether I feel like deconstructed post-apocalypse or surrealism. (There was a stage version in 2006 that I really wish I'd been on the right side of the Atlantic to see.) Her short fiction is what I most frequently re-read.