It's the operator's job, not mine

[sovay]

And then tonight I've crashed, which means I'm going to be angry with myself for losing the mood of this weekend when I didn't even sleep in the car on the way to West Springfield and we parked in some auto shop's driveway and I saw fancy chickens and singing vegetables and had variously regional lunch at permanent and to-scale replicas of six state houses and rode my first coaster with rushthatspeaks and derspatchel (I mean my first coaster with either of them, not my first coaster absolute; I believe that honor belongs to Space Mountain at Disney World in 1989, when I argued and argued with my parents that I was tall enough for the ride and then spent the entire time convinced it was about to get us killed) and caught a string of green Mardi Gras beads from a float we weren't expecting in the middle of an otherwise rather True Stories-esque parade. I was in a rocky mood when I left the house this evening, and it didn't help that I was going to a mall—I hate clothes shopping—but I thought I had returned with a successfully purchased shirt until about five minutes after I got home, at which point it became clear that while the sales clerk wasn't lying when she said the shirt fit me, it is completely useless to me for the purposes I bought it for. I hate returning things. It never fails to make me feel as though I've made a mistake and now I have to go hat in hand to the people whose fault it isn't, asking them to fix it for me. Well, it's a perfectly good shirt. Well, then you shouldn't have bought it, should you? Well, why is that our problem? It was not a cheap shirt. I can't afford to buy clothes I don't wear. Tomorrow means back to the mall. But then I had a totally reasonable and even cheering conversation: I should have gone to bed humming and instead it's late at night and raw as the season that used to love me and blammo. Ahoy, miniature Ludwig. I thought I got Tiny Richardson to take a motorbike to you months ago. And it's a week from my birthday.

I think I am going to watch things on YouTube with Denholm Elliott in until I'm too tired to stare at a screen, but I have no idea how long that is going to take. I won't be able to find this even if I wanted to watch it, but it's an attractive photograph of him. I've never been prone to crushes on actors (I don't know them, only their roles) and he would have been a terrible idea in any case, but he's always interested me for the way he was every now and then very good-looking and you would never know it from most of his characters. It wasn't that he specialized in heavies—a straight-up bastard like Dr. Swaby in A Private Function (1984) was rarer than the disastrous martinet of an army captain he played in Too Late the Hero (1969), too fastidious and indecisive to inspire a suicide mission or safeguard his men home alive, or the father in the original television Brimstone and Treacle (1976) who hasn't really thought the implications of his conservative nostalgia through. He died twenty years ago, but he's one of those people whose deaths I can never quite believe in: I turn on the television, I rent a movie, and there he is in another role, quietly filling in the corners in his scene-stealing way. "I can make two lines seem like Hamlet," he said once in an interview; he could suggest creases in a character's interior life the writer never even thought to put in. Creases, bedhead, rumpled collars, hangovers: so many of his characters are a little seedy, a little slipshod, not quite up to facing the world or themselves without at least a stiff drink; he ran a marvelous line in helpless smiles and apologetic brows, wincing anxiously from the knowledge that they'll never even try to change. It took me years to notice he was decently tall, because he could hang back to be caught out and shown up like nobody's business. But he could also play tricks with vulnerability: some of those ingratiatingly flustered men are less nice than they appear, angrier, more cunning, with more on their consciences than incompetence. I haven't yet seen him in Nothing But the Best (1964), the role that confirmed him as a character actor rather than a juvenile lead. Having seen him startlingly young and tragic in movies like The Sound Barrier (1952) and The Cruel Sea (1953), I'm very curious.

He could play positive characters: they leaned toward holy fools like generous, disorganized Mr. Emerson of A Room with a View (1985) or the inimitable Marcus Brody, politely calling into the bustle of a Turkish market, "I say, does anyone here speak English? Or even ancient Greek?" I love him as John Jarndyce in the 1985 Bleak House because he brings to a character whose actions are almost impossibly saintly the welcome and wonderful sense of someone whose natural tendency in the face of challenge is to collapse or retreat (the Growlery, hiding behind furniture whenever a particularly strident charity-monger rings the doorbell with her brood), but it's not stronger than his desire to protect those without his defenses of law and class—he hates the Jarndyce name, but it does give him something to conjure with—so he makes himself face the lawsuit, the bafflement of child-rearing, even the guilt of an old friendship when it becomes parasitic, a handwringer by nature pulling himself together to advocate for others (he's no good doing it for himself), chemistry and Chancery be damned. He may be even better as bitter, determined Krogstad in A Doll's House (1973) because it's a role that exploits his gift for characters whose tarnish is showing through: the blackmail is real, but so is his willingness to drop it when asked by the woman he still loves, not because he's sentimental or she's seductive, but because she offers him an alternative, honestly, and no one has trusted him in years. He's troubled and brave and terribly out of his depth trying to interpret the actions of a spectre in the BBC's The Signalman (1976). I have a lot of sympathy for Henry Beddows in To the Devil a Daughter (1976), but I don't think I was supposed to.

I know much less about his stage work, as I know very little about his life beyond the big items: birth in London in 1922, prisoner of war in Stalag Luft VIII-B, married briefly and unsuccessfully to an erstwhile co-star, married non-monogamously and for the rest of his life to a woman who wrote a memoir of him afterward; died in 1992 of AIDS-related TB. His daughter was a casualty of The Daily Mail. He originated multiple roles for Christopher Fry: Private Able in A Sleep of Prisoners (1951), the twins Hugo and Frédéric in Ring Round the Moon (1950), Edgar in Venus Observed (1950). They're on my itinerary if I ever get that time machine. Until then, I seem to have successfully distracted myself—or at least slightly burnt myself out—with the realization that this post should have been a much longer essay about an actor who dropped suddenly into my life in the fall of 2008 and doesn't look like he'll go away any time soon, given how often he turns up where I wasn't looking for him. (Ralph Richardson does that, too.)

Maybe I'll stare at YouTube in the morning.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have loved Denholm Eliott since I saw Trading Places and A Room With a View very close together in university film club and realised that he was what made both films real. He's one of my favourite actors, along with William H. Macy. Amazing range, and an amazing ability to imply as you say.

I hope you wake up to a better day. There is sunshine here.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Rocks-in-a-tumbler sort of day, right?

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

I need to go shopping, soon, too. My clothing has decided to all wear out at the same time. Sunday was the Durham fair with fancy chickens and a rabbit that was gigantic and spotted and had massive ears. She seemed to really want to interact with people, too, which is unusual. No singing vegetables and fried dough still makes me sick to my stomach - I have to test once a year.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Nnngh, neither of us are doing all that well, are we? I'll try to post something distracting later on. Last night, for example, I finally started watching Revenge, thus discovering that Emily Vanderkamp's immobile face is not, actually, very immobile at all. She is indeed somewhat the female version of Jim Profit, though her very "darkness" (the thing her partner/minion Nolan is so attracted to, because it scares him) isn't something Profit could approach, because his brand of sociopathy prevents him from feeling bad even on his own behalf. He was way too Zen to ever reply, when Nolan says, of one victim: "You've already destroyed his career", "But I want to destroy his life."

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Here's *hugs* for you, and a punch for shoulder philosophers.

I can only really
comment on "The Signalman" - I so wanted to save Elliott's character from his fate. It's all there in the way he glances at the bell.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry for the crash. I hate both clothes-shopping and clothes-returning as well. I hope the morning has been an improvement, or at least not worse.

Singing vegetables and fancy chickens are definitely something. And hopefully you didn't have to suffer through someone talking about how to use the fancy chickens for fly-tying the whole time. (Or for fighting, although at least I've never been put through that.)

Tiny Ludwig Wittgenstein, do you please leave Sonya alone. If you behave yourself, maybe I'll introduce you to Tiny Mícheál Mac Liammóir. I think the pair of ye might get on well.

[gwynnega]

Oh, Denholm Elliott. I think the first film I saw him in was Bad Timing: a Sensual Obsession...he was unforgettable.

I hope some sleep banished Tiny W.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Apropos to very little, game last night produced a possible idea of where to go with the heroic fuckups and unicorn localized shenanigans. Nothing immediately portable, but there was the memorable quote "how long can an undead unicorn possibly burn, anyway?"

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

If at some point you would like my help with clothes shopping, including merchandise returns, please do let me know. Despite my usual jeans-and-tshirt attire I do know clothes reasonably well, and I know customer service considerably better than I do clothes.

I think I do with voice actors what you do with character actors, though not quite as actively. I do enjoy good character actors, though. I might recognize Denholm Elliott if I saw him in a role, but likely not by name. Then again, I have a horrible head for names.

[three-magpies.livejournal.com]

When I first rode Space Mountain, some time in the mid-80s, I begged and begged to get on; then, I screamed bloody murder and wouldn't even get on Thunder Mountain Railroad after. Something about the dark and not being able to see... brrr... it was better when I tried again in my teens.

You should put on the green Mardi Gras beads. They are certainly lucky. Floats in parades show up just when needed.

I predict the beads will help you feel better. :)

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

It sounds like your weekend would have been tiring, as well as awesome, so I would not feel bad about running out of energy today.
I will post something more coherent tomorrow evening.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yesterday evening wakanomori came over to me--okay, not evening, wee hours of this morning--and said, "So, sovay... she likes British character actors." --And then I remembered that there was an entry of yours that I had missed reading.

(Interesting, isn't it? He read and appreciated your entire entry, but he almost never comments, so you would normally never know. Except that this morning I'm a blabbermouth)

I was thinking about how much I enjoyed reading what you had to say about Denholm Eliott, even though I've never seen any of the films in question, and I think it's for the sensitivity of your reading of the relationships and the characters in the movies:

the blackmail is real, but so is his willingness to drop it when asked by the woman he still loves, not because he's sentimental or she's seductive, but because she offers him an alternative, honestly, and no one has trusted him in years.

How we all want to be given alternatives.

And this:

he hates the Jarndyce name, but it does give him something to conjure with

I can so appreciate that! You have an ill-gotten gain, or not ill-gotten maybe, but some advantage you despise... you despise it, but you use it--for good! for good! you hope, but that makes you an accomplice to its oppressiveness.

Oh but wait! You say he was the signalman in The Signalman? That I did see--thanks to you!--and it was excellent.

[lycomingst.livejournal.com]

I remember reading an interview with a British actor (who it was is of course gone from my memory) who said, in effect, if you want to be the center of attention in a movie, never be in a scene with animals, children or Denholm Elliot.

[ajodasso.livejournal.com]

A Room With a View is superb. However, I'm also very fond of the turn he did in Toy Soldiers (yes, the B action-flick starring a very young Sean Astin and Wil Wheaton) as Dr. Robert Gould, the headmaster.