I get sort of carried away, you know, being so normal and everything

[sovay]

(This post delayed on account of Livejournal. Argh.)

A meme! In its vanishing natural habitat. cucumberseed assigned this one to me; technically it's supposed to propagate on Facebook, but I refuse to post there. Why do these things always turn into essays?

Actor I was given:

Peter Sellers. An actor I have seen in a number of movies, but never particularly followed. Actually, this is something of a challenge.

Movie I loved:

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). I know it's the obvious answer, but it's the rare example of a film I love where I don't like a single one of the characters—that's not what they're there for—and the ending careens so far past even satire, it's actually about as chilling as the finale of its straight dramatic counterpart Fail-Safe (1964). As it was the first movie in which I saw Peter Sellers, I had no hope of recognizing him for years, but I knew that one of his characters was responsible for my favorite exchange in the entire, rather compulsively quotable film: "You're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company." Slightly more problematically, it was also the first context in which I heard Vera Lynn.

Runner-up: Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (1955), in which Peter Sellers plays a nervy, naive Teddy Boy who is—like the rest of his gang—no match for the oblivious steamroller of the previous generation, and Alec Guinness plays Alastair Sim.

Movie I liked:

Lolita (1962). This should have been a great movie; instead it's an interesting one. James Mason is pitch-perfect as Humbert Humbert. His dry, dark, saturnine voice and his air of vulnerable cruelty (thank you, Gainsborough) have the same effect on the audience as the famous first lines of Nabokov's prose, making something attractive of a protagonist whose erudite relish of his own depravity—at times reminiscent of Kind Hearts and Coronets' Louis Mazzini, elegantly annotating his progress as a murderer—is stretched ever thinner over a self-deluding abyss; the character is both predator and patsy and Mason plays him like the tragic hero of a grand romance, leaving the audience to extricate themselves from his mythologizing and into Kubrick's deadpan black satire. Meanwhile Clare Quilty's part is considerably expanded from the novel, but I cannot think of an actor better suited to the role as Nabokov rewrote it than Sellers; he is nemesis and shadowplay, a carnival demon ricocheting through the film in quick-change guises of policeman, psychoanalyst, chatty, chance-met strangers constantly breaking in on the fraying escapism of Humbert's life with Lolita, literally polymorphously perverse. In his best turn, he's just a fast talker with the annoying middle-American habit of keeping a conversation going in the face of desperately polite disinterest, aggressively, unnervingly normal. The problem is Sue Lyon, Lolita. The character had already been aged up from twelve to fourteen in order for the film to pass at all under the Production Code; the actress' well-developed figure—emphasized by bikinis, high heels, tight belted sweaters—adds another three or four apparent years, defusing too much of the novel's transgression. There's nothing out of the American mainstream about wanting to bang a barely legal bombshell. In her defense, Lyon nails the sulky, teenage triteness that horrifies Humbert Humbert as much as it enthralls him, being so conventional a choice of love object that his pretenses to a magnificent exception are all the more scathingly exposed, but the lack of the Lolita Nabokov wrote is, unsurprisingly, a huge hole in the film.* At least it's got poshlost to spare.

* I don't blame the actress; Kubrick had originally wanted Hayley Mills. At fourteen, Mills was just at the outer edge of Nabokov's definition of a nymphet, but could easily pass for younger with her light voice and her gamine build; she had been eleven in her screen debut as Gillie in Tiger Bay (1959) and looked more like ten, a tough, open-eyed tomboy falling into curious friendship with a troubled young sailor after stealing the gun he shot his girlfriend with; thirteen for Kathy in Whistle Down the Wind (1961), a Northern schoolgirl who leads her younger siblings in believing the fugitive criminal they're hiding in their barn is Christ. Lolita would have been a fascinating extension of these roles with their amoral innocence and half-knowing interactions with the adult world, reflecting darkly back on Kathy's protectiveness or Gillie's impatience to run away to sea. Unfortunately, Mills had also starred recently in Pollyanna (1960) and The Parent Trap (1961) and only over Walt's dead body was Disney going to let its most bankable ingénue make headlines as a pedophile's pin-up; she was obliged to turn down the part and Lyon was cast instead.

Movie I hated:

The Pink Panther (1963) et al. Gave us the cartoon and the indelible music, which I appreciate. Otherwise I don't see the point.

Comment and I will give you an actor or actress!

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll play...

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Because essays are one of your great art forms? I so want a book of your collected film reviews, side by side on the shelf with rushthatspeaks's 365 books.

Nine

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

Dr. Strangelove

I always think about the "precious bodily fluids" when I hear about this movie.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Ha, I wish I had seen enough of anyone's films to be able to partake, but I liked the Lolita review, and it sort of interested me in the film, which, coming from someone who has never read the source material and is never going to....

Sorry, comma abuse is, apparently, all I got this morning.

I'll second whoever said your essays are readable and cogent, though.

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

Wow--the Facebook version of this is much simpler. Just a list of 3 movies without explanation. And I added the link to Kevin Bacon, just for kicks (for Peter Sellers, it's Casino Royale with Woody Allen, who was in Hannah and Her Sisters with Dianne Wiese, who was in Footloose with Kevin Bacon).

I liked it because you had to choose something you hated, even if it was your favorite actor, and something you liked, even if it was someone you couldn't stand. And the titles a person chose usually told you all you wanted to know.

But what the heck, I'll give it a try in the long form.

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

I'm fascinated by your choices! I totally agree on the first two, but I still remember The Pink Panther fondly. Some of the movies in the series are better than others. I'll go ahead and blame my affections on nostalgia. ;) Big part of my childhood, those films.

Please give me an actor/actress! :D

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

Interesting that all the names put forward so far are of actors -- paralleling the Hollywood custom of disappearing women after they stop being decorative.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

With you on the Pink Panther. I thought it would have been infinitely better to let Herbert Lom be the star.

I'm also a big fan of Sellers in I'm All Right Jack.

[gwynnega]

I agree with your assessment of these films, though Lolita's strengths pretty much make me overlook its flaws.

Other films of Sellers that I like a lot: I Love You Alice B. Toklas (featuring the immortal line "It's very unhip to say you're hip!") and Being There.