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Don't you sign away your name again
Bad: I spent most of last night in too much pain to sleep, and I'm not exactly sleeping overtime as it is. I don't feel like I'm here at all.
Not bad: while unable to sleep, I discovered one of the roles George Sanders should be known for and isn't.
It's in This Land Is Mine (1943), Jean Renoir's drama-fable about life under the German occupation; script by Dudley Nichols, rest of the cast Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, Una O'Connor. The names set it somewhere in France, but the film is deliberately scripted and staged as if taking place anywhere in occupied Europe that could also be England or the United States, those still-free powers that might be inclined to look down on German-held countries as cowards or collaborators. Which is precisely what the story is about: Laughton plays Albert Lory, a timid schoolteacher hopelessly in love with a beautiful colleague, too shy to tell her and too frightened of the world in general to know what to do next if he did; early in the film, he's shamed in front of his students by panicking badly during an air raid and thereafter he's assumed to have turned in Louise's brother, a signalman who helped sabotage a Berlin-bound train, because everyone knows now there's nothing Lory couldn't be scared into doing. As it happens, he's innocent. The real culprit is Sanders' George Lambert, who is not smooth or caddish or lazily epigrammatic; he's a basically decent, conventional man who discovers too late that he doesn't have either the self-knowledge or the self-deception required to be a traitor. He talks himself into betraying his best friend for the allegedly greater good, but he's having second thoughts even as he gives up the fatal information; his conflicted attempts to warn Paul, however, only guarantee his friend's death. The German commander who comes to visit afterward is cheerfully, contemptuously clear: having demonstrated that he can betray, George will be expected to go on doing it, as much and as often as the Germans need. He might start with the dead man's sister, his ex-fiancée. He shoots himself first.
I do not want to shortchange Charles Laughton, who makes the transformation from quaking nobody to momentary hero of the resistance with believable clumsiness and an odd, clownish grace, but I knew he had the range; I hadn't actually been sure about Sanders. But from about his third scene on, he's devastating: there's no way this ends well and he knows it. He's a dead man walking from the moment he lights Major von Keller's cigarette. I wish he'd been cast in more of these off-type roles.
The rest of today: I have no idea. Read the new John le Carré and do laundry, I think. I'm not sure about staring at TCM.
Not bad: while unable to sleep, I discovered one of the roles George Sanders should be known for and isn't.
It's in This Land Is Mine (1943), Jean Renoir's drama-fable about life under the German occupation; script by Dudley Nichols, rest of the cast Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, Una O'Connor. The names set it somewhere in France, but the film is deliberately scripted and staged as if taking place anywhere in occupied Europe that could also be England or the United States, those still-free powers that might be inclined to look down on German-held countries as cowards or collaborators. Which is precisely what the story is about: Laughton plays Albert Lory, a timid schoolteacher hopelessly in love with a beautiful colleague, too shy to tell her and too frightened of the world in general to know what to do next if he did; early in the film, he's shamed in front of his students by panicking badly during an air raid and thereafter he's assumed to have turned in Louise's brother, a signalman who helped sabotage a Berlin-bound train, because everyone knows now there's nothing Lory couldn't be scared into doing. As it happens, he's innocent. The real culprit is Sanders' George Lambert, who is not smooth or caddish or lazily epigrammatic; he's a basically decent, conventional man who discovers too late that he doesn't have either the self-knowledge or the self-deception required to be a traitor. He talks himself into betraying his best friend for the allegedly greater good, but he's having second thoughts even as he gives up the fatal information; his conflicted attempts to warn Paul, however, only guarantee his friend's death. The German commander who comes to visit afterward is cheerfully, contemptuously clear: having demonstrated that he can betray, George will be expected to go on doing it, as much and as often as the Germans need. He might start with the dead man's sister, his ex-fiancée. He shoots himself first.
I do not want to shortchange Charles Laughton, who makes the transformation from quaking nobody to momentary hero of the resistance with believable clumsiness and an odd, clownish grace, but I knew he had the range; I hadn't actually been sure about Sanders. But from about his third scene on, he's devastating: there's no way this ends well and he knows it. He's a dead man walking from the moment he lights Major von Keller's cigarette. I wish he'd been cast in more of these off-type roles.
The rest of today: I have no idea. Read the new John le Carré and do laundry, I think. I'm not sure about staring at TCM.
no subject
I'd love to. Now that I have transport, that'll be relatively easy to accomplish.
The thing about Mutiny on the Bounty, at least the Laughton/Gable version... there are at least two complex dramas that the movie first sets up, then discards. As in the book, the expedition gets to Tahiti (I think?) and spends a long time there before heading home. Leaving Tahiti provokes the title mutiny, in fact. Well, while on Tahiti, a lot of the nicer protagonists start relationships with (gorgeous, exotic-ified) Tahitian women. Fletcher Christian hooks up with the daughter of one of the local chieftains. Then they're forced to leave them, and the mutiny breaks loose.
Much later, the mutineers somehow-or-other stop back at Tahiti, talk their girlfriends into fleeing with them aboard the stolen ship, and they sail off to Pitcairn Island and wreck the ship so they can't go back. Well, the problematical thing here... The girlfriends are pretty cool with that. Christian's girlfriend's dad is sad, but he's completely cool about letting her sail off into nowhere with a probable murderer, though she can never come home again, even if she changes her mind. (My mother watched it to that point and said, "In real life, those girls' families would have been down on the beach, weeping and beating their breasts and scratching themselves with shells in grief, because they knew they'd never see the girls again." My mom has actually read the book. Maybe that happens in the book, I don't know.) Anyhow, the only people I really felt sorry for there were the girlfriends. It's as though no one involved in the film noticed that women were people and would have opinions about this. Anyhow, it was bad writing.
Similarly punch-pulling: the film ends back in England with a handful of the mutineers about to be executed in the morning. And we've spent the whole film with these guys, and know that they're basically decent men who were involved against their will; they had no other option. The protagonist gets off on a technicality, though, so that's OK. Then he receives an officer's commission and sails away aboard another ship with "Rule, Britannia" playing on the soundtrack, as far as I can tell, non-ironically. We're actually supposed to have a warm fuzzy feeling about this. We go straight from the pale staring faces in the condemned cell to the protagonist trotting off to his bright new future. It was just revolting.
Mind you, if the rest of the movie had stunk, I wouldn't have minded those things in particular. The movie was good enough at other points for me to feel betrayed when it came out with hamhanded stuff like that transition from the condemned cell.
no subject
Which reminds me: Ian Wallace, "A Transport of Delight."
It's as though no one involved in the film noticed that women were people and would have opinions about this.
In 1935! Imagine!
The movie was good enough at other points for me to feel betrayed when it came out with hamhanded stuff like that transition from the condemned cell.
It is very annoying when art has dead spots like that.