![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We have to get into his mind
1. I have a skullcrushing headache; I woke up with it and it's gotten steadily worse since. I think I dreamed something to do with gender-changing, but not so as I could fit it into a story. This is probably not a very coherent post.
2. Thanks to the miracle of streaming Netflix, Cloudburst (1951) may be the first film I was able to watch within a day of reading an article about it; I'd never heard of it before Sunday. It turns out to be a clever, surprisingly brutal British noir starring Robert Preston and written by Leo Marks.
This is not a pair of names I ever expected to find on the same playbill. I grew up on the former, mostly as Toddy in Victor/Victoria (1982) and Professor Harold Hill on the original cast recording of The Music Man. The latter I discovered only a few years ago, despite already knowing a poem he'd written—he is much more famous for the screenplay for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), a film I really should watch again. Between Silk and Cyanide (1998), Marks' account of his work as a codemaker for the Special Operations Executive, is one of the most engagingly written and most guarded memoirs I have ever read. I had thought Peeping Tom was the closest he came to fictionalizing that material, transferring the secrecy, the double meanings and the obsessiveness to a different form of art. Cloudburst is so front-and-center with all the tech-y details of a cryptographer killing for vengeance in the postwar shadows of London, it feels like a kind of darkly alternate autobiography or perhaps a cautionary tale, as Preston's John Graham utilizes everything he's learned about "ungentlemanly warfare" to take revenge on the couple who casually murdered his wife, all the while playing cat-and-mouse with the police inspector who has brought him—a clue to the mysterious killings—one of his own codes to break. There's a lot that's familiar in this story, but it shows up here earlier than I remember. So, too, the depth of anti-heroism on display, with Graham practicing on one of his victims the same tortures the Gestapo inflicted on his wife, when she was an agent of the Resistance and Graham the man who couldn't keep her safe (though she never gave up a single name, even after she was crippled for life). He carries a cyanide pill in his lapel, as if it were still—again—what's the difference—wartime. There are the usual scenes where he gets in touch with his old contacts and asks them to do various odd jobs for him, but while at first they cheerfully oblige for "the Colonel," it's not long before they begin to sense that they're enabling something private and dangerous and start to back away.
And the film's own morality is intriguingly murky. More than one character tries to talk Graham out of his self-appointed vendetta by reminding him of the killers he used to fight, all the honor he's throwing away. It's a good argument, but where they slip up is in attempting to persuade him that Carol would never have condoned his descent into vigilante justice. The audience and Graham happen to know that's not true:
"Good evening, constable. You're late tonight."
"There's an alarm out. Man and a woman. Killed a night watchman, they have. Broke his neck . . . Killed his dog, too. Nice little thing."
"Well, if we see them—"
"You won't see them, Mr. Graham, they're heading for London. But we'll get 'em. Good night, sir."
". . . 'We'll get 'em.' If I were that night watchman's widow, I'd get them first."
"Would you?"
"I'd try. I'd hound them with as little pity as we hounded Zimmerman."
She says it coldly and clearly: it might be easy rhetoric coming from a civilian, but as we are later to learn, she got Zimmerman. She's much less the angel in Graham's house than a fury who happens to love him, this dark, petite woman who's an indifferent hand at crosswords and limps badly. The old wound between them is not that she was tortured, but that he's never forgiven himself for letting it happen and she's never been able to make him understand that there was nothing for him to let: it was her choice, she knew the risks, and she's never been sorry. Were the premise of the film reversed, we have no doubt that she'd go about her mission with the same cool efficiency as her husband and without his dead weight of guilt. (Damn it, I know it couldn't have been made even in the glory days of the femme fatale, but I kind of wish Marks had written that film. This is where someone tells me to see Kill Bill, isn't it?) Technically I suppose she's still the woman in the fridge, but at least a much less idolized example than usual—or at least those things that Graham idolized about her are not the traditional virtues.
It's not as good a movie as Peeping Tom, but I wouldn't have expected it to be; it has some still-modern elements and some that I suspect only feel unoriginal because I've seen them a thousand times since in police procedurals and crime dramas. The treatment of a killer's personality as a kind of code, for example, to be cracked and illuminate the nature of the crime. What you don't see as often is the twistiness of codes, that are sometimes critical and sometimes noise and sometimes no more than odd detail after the fact, telling you nothing more than could be gathered another way. People aren't simple puzzles. You never know what you don't know about them.
The title is still kind of stupid, though.
3. Arcade Fire plus David Byrne? Yes, please.
4. I hate feeling that I must own a copy of Lovecraft Unbound (2009) and not being able to find it anywhere.
5. "Brutus. Shut up. You're going to die."
2. Thanks to the miracle of streaming Netflix, Cloudburst (1951) may be the first film I was able to watch within a day of reading an article about it; I'd never heard of it before Sunday. It turns out to be a clever, surprisingly brutal British noir starring Robert Preston and written by Leo Marks.
This is not a pair of names I ever expected to find on the same playbill. I grew up on the former, mostly as Toddy in Victor/Victoria (1982) and Professor Harold Hill on the original cast recording of The Music Man. The latter I discovered only a few years ago, despite already knowing a poem he'd written—he is much more famous for the screenplay for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), a film I really should watch again. Between Silk and Cyanide (1998), Marks' account of his work as a codemaker for the Special Operations Executive, is one of the most engagingly written and most guarded memoirs I have ever read. I had thought Peeping Tom was the closest he came to fictionalizing that material, transferring the secrecy, the double meanings and the obsessiveness to a different form of art. Cloudburst is so front-and-center with all the tech-y details of a cryptographer killing for vengeance in the postwar shadows of London, it feels like a kind of darkly alternate autobiography or perhaps a cautionary tale, as Preston's John Graham utilizes everything he's learned about "ungentlemanly warfare" to take revenge on the couple who casually murdered his wife, all the while playing cat-and-mouse with the police inspector who has brought him—a clue to the mysterious killings—one of his own codes to break. There's a lot that's familiar in this story, but it shows up here earlier than I remember. So, too, the depth of anti-heroism on display, with Graham practicing on one of his victims the same tortures the Gestapo inflicted on his wife, when she was an agent of the Resistance and Graham the man who couldn't keep her safe (though she never gave up a single name, even after she was crippled for life). He carries a cyanide pill in his lapel, as if it were still—again—what's the difference—wartime. There are the usual scenes where he gets in touch with his old contacts and asks them to do various odd jobs for him, but while at first they cheerfully oblige for "the Colonel," it's not long before they begin to sense that they're enabling something private and dangerous and start to back away.
And the film's own morality is intriguingly murky. More than one character tries to talk Graham out of his self-appointed vendetta by reminding him of the killers he used to fight, all the honor he's throwing away. It's a good argument, but where they slip up is in attempting to persuade him that Carol would never have condoned his descent into vigilante justice. The audience and Graham happen to know that's not true:
"Good evening, constable. You're late tonight."
"There's an alarm out. Man and a woman. Killed a night watchman, they have. Broke his neck . . . Killed his dog, too. Nice little thing."
"Well, if we see them—"
"You won't see them, Mr. Graham, they're heading for London. But we'll get 'em. Good night, sir."
". . . 'We'll get 'em.' If I were that night watchman's widow, I'd get them first."
"Would you?"
"I'd try. I'd hound them with as little pity as we hounded Zimmerman."
She says it coldly and clearly: it might be easy rhetoric coming from a civilian, but as we are later to learn, she got Zimmerman. She's much less the angel in Graham's house than a fury who happens to love him, this dark, petite woman who's an indifferent hand at crosswords and limps badly. The old wound between them is not that she was tortured, but that he's never forgiven himself for letting it happen and she's never been able to make him understand that there was nothing for him to let: it was her choice, she knew the risks, and she's never been sorry. Were the premise of the film reversed, we have no doubt that she'd go about her mission with the same cool efficiency as her husband and without his dead weight of guilt. (Damn it, I know it couldn't have been made even in the glory days of the femme fatale, but I kind of wish Marks had written that film. This is where someone tells me to see Kill Bill, isn't it?) Technically I suppose she's still the woman in the fridge, but at least a much less idolized example than usual—or at least those things that Graham idolized about her are not the traditional virtues.
It's not as good a movie as Peeping Tom, but I wouldn't have expected it to be; it has some still-modern elements and some that I suspect only feel unoriginal because I've seen them a thousand times since in police procedurals and crime dramas. The treatment of a killer's personality as a kind of code, for example, to be cracked and illuminate the nature of the crime. What you don't see as often is the twistiness of codes, that are sometimes critical and sometimes noise and sometimes no more than odd detail after the fact, telling you nothing more than could be gathered another way. People aren't simple puzzles. You never know what you don't know about them.
The title is still kind of stupid, though.
3. Arcade Fire plus David Byrne? Yes, please.
4. I hate feeling that I must own a copy of Lovecraft Unbound (2009) and not being able to find it anywhere.
5. "Brutus. Shut up. You're going to die."
no subject
David Byrne is in everything. He's like high fructose corn syrup, only awesome.
no subject
Ack. I'm sorry.
David Byrne is in everything. He's like high fructose corn syrup, only awesome.
. . . What happens if you consume too much of him?
no subject